


Duende

by Ardatli



Series: Profs!AU [6]
Category: Criminal Minds, Young Avengers
Genre: AO3 Fundraiser Auction, AU of an AU, AU-ception, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe – No Powers, Billy makes bad choices, Crossover, M/M, Minor Character Death, Profs!AU, Teddy is a saint, canon-typical violence (Criminal Minds), casefic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-13
Updated: 2013-07-17
Packaged: 2017-12-19 08:43:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 36,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/881770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ardatli/pseuds/Ardatli
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>duen•de  [dwen-de; English doo-en-dey]  noun. </p><p>Having soul, a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity.</p><p>Or, 'that one where the Young Avengers are college professors, and the BAU is investigating the campus.' A Profs!AU/Criminal Minds crossover.</p><p>Written for the AO3 Auction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Monday

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GlassNecromancer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GlassNecromancer/gifts).



> Shoutout to tinyhipsterboy, my favourite cute barista, for coffee jokes and grinning in the face of dumb questions. 
> 
> Love forever to my fearless betas, feebleapb and khirsah, for whipping this sorry mess into shape. All errors are mine and 100% likely to be something they warned me about that I didn’t listen to. 
> 
> This fic was written for Glass_Necromancer, for the AO3 fundraiser auction. See end notes for the original prompt (contains spoilers!).
> 
> \--
> 
> FOR THE RECORD. This fic was prompted, planned and mostly written long before the airing of the beginning of Teen Wolf season 3. (And this note is being written right after the airing of episode 3.) Any similarities in premise are entirely coincidental, and frankly, have been the cause of a lot of teeth-gnashing over at my Tumblr (ardatli.tumblr.com – come hang out!). I'm going to finish this up as per my original plans, and hopefully our wires haven't crossed too badly.
> 
> Tl;dr: Damn you, Jeff Davis! 
> 
> \--
> 
> There are minor character deaths in this story: some OCs, and three names from the Marvel universe. For a list of the deceased (SPOILERS!) see the end notes. 
> 
> \--
> 
> For those joining me from the Criminal Minds side of things, you don’t need to worry about Young Avengers canon. This is set in an alternate universe where various Marvel characters are faculty and staff at a fictional university in New York City (primarily the Avengers and Young Avengers, mix of the comic and movie canons). Everything else should be reasonably self-explanatory.  
> Also, Darcy Lewis. She's Jane Foster's assistant in the MCU movie Thor, and has been repurposed here as a departmental administrator. If you don't like Darcy, we can't be friends. 
> 
> For those coming in from Young Avengers fandom who may not have read ‘There’s No Textbook for This,’ you’ll be fine. The short form: The YA crowd are in their early 30s, and are college faculty. Except Tommy; he’s a lawyer. Teddy started working at NYCU about three years before the start of this story, which is also the point when he met Billy. 
> 
> The Behavioral Analysis Unit (the main characters in Criminal Minds) is a section of the FBI established to hunt down serial killers. They do this through the careful analysis of the personality and psychological state of the Unknown SUBject (UnSub), in order to predict his or her future actions. The focus in Criminal Minds is very much on the psychology of the killers and the victims, not on the forensics. 
> 
> \--
> 
> While this story takes place in the Profs!AU universe, there were some changes I needed to make to both that and the Criminal Minds timeline to get things to fall in line cleanly. It's best to view this as an Out-of-canon OAV for Profs AU.
> 
> This is set somewhere in Season 5 of Criminal Minds, after the end of the Reaper storyline, and about two years after the end of There’s No Textbook for This. Yes, I know they don’t line up temporally. 
> 
> So have fun with this, I hope, but take nothing in here as canon outside of itself.

 Greenwich Village, NYC: 

Bill Kaplan skimmed the essay in his hands, lodging his red pen behind his ear. The clip caught on the arm of his glasses, and then in his hair. He flipped to the final page and groaned aloud. “Seriously? Listen to this.”

The lump under the covers beside him stirred, and an arm reached out to snake around Billy’s waist. Teddy’s breath huffed softly against his hip, and the warm bulk of him settled down against Billy’s side. “Well?” came the vaguely disgruntled reply from somewhere around Billy’s lower back. There was the gentle brush of lips, then an expectant silence.

“Sorry,” Billy replied, not entirely repentant. “Were you sleeping?”

“No, since you haven’t turned the light off yet, and you left a stack of term papers on my butt.” The covers shifted and Teddy curled more firmly around Billy’s back. “It’s late. Put those down and get some sleep, B.”

Some part of his mind vaguely registered the time, but– “just this one to finish, _then_ bed,” he bargained, dropping his hand to scruff absently through Teddy’s hair.

“Give them to Alex,” Teddy grumbled in return. “That’s what TAs are for.”

“Five more minutes.”

“I’ll resort to bribery if I have to.” Teddy warned as he propped himself up on his elbows, the corners of his mouth twitching up in a smile. He was shirtless, just a pair of pajama pants sitting low around his hips, and the broad expanse of his back was enough to be distracting all on its own.

Billy arched an eyebrow, not at all embarrassed to let his own grin show. “Really? What’s your best offer?”

_Oh._

Teddy’s mouth on his was nothing new but still thrilling every time. His mouth drifting lower, leaving stinging bites down his chest – also nothing new, but infinitely more appealing. “You realize that this is setting a bad precedent?” Billy asked, unable to help himself. “Reward for bringing work to bed?”

Teddy’s low chuckle vibrated against his cock, already hard and straining against the thin cotton of Billy’s boxers.“I’m thinking of it more as positive reinforcement for putting everything away.”

The papers went over the side; half a glance showed him a reasonably neat pile. He’d sort it out in the morning. A guy had priorities.

\--

_It takes so little to set the proper mood._

_Wine. Music. Candles. Not everybody likes the thick smolder-sweet smell of beeswax, the way the tall flames smoke and gutter, but there’s something romantic about the classics._

_It’s the details that matter, everything in place, everyone aware of their cues; when something’s this important, you want it to be right._

_It needs to be right._

_She’s so beautiful like this, waiting in silence, silver-pale in the candles’ glow. It’s so easy to forget that this was supposed to be an apology, a way to beg forgiveness. That’s dangerous._

_The moon is full, round and cool, the gleam shining down through the high windows and throwing the room into soft relief. The candlelight takes care of the rest of the sharp edges, rounding and gentling them to something more welcoming. Warm._

_There’s enough light to still catch flashes of color; the cream of her skin, the flush rising in her cheeks, the contrast of the white linen against the dark chair. If this were about sex –_

_But that’s never been the point, has it?_

\--

The room was dark, only the faintest hint of light from the full moon slipping in between the cracks in the curtains. Billy padded back to bed, the wood floor cool on his bare feet, and curled into Teddy’s waiting arms.

Teddy’s chin settled on the top of his head, his arms wrapping around Billy possessively.

Teddy spoke after a moment, his voice rumbling low under Billy’s ear. “So what was so funny?”

“Hmm?” It took him a minute to remember, his brain fuzzed around the edges with warmth and satisfaction. “Oh, the paper. Writing about the Crusades. His main thesis was that the Popes called the crusades because ‘God told them to, and the Pope serves God.’”

Teddy curled his knees in behind Billy’s, their bodies settling together in a snug curve beneath the sheets. Billy slid his hand over Teddy’s, and Teddy splayed his fingers to make room for Billy’s to slip between. “That was certainly the usual excuse,” Teddy replied easily, sleep creeping in around the edges of his voice. “They could hardly openly admit to manipulating religious callings for personal power grabs.”

“No, he meant it literally. The only source in his bibliography was the Bible. And quotes from his parish priest.”

“…oy.”

“I think that’s my line.”

\--

_“Wake up.”_

_It’s important that she be awake for this, that her eyes be open, glassy as they are. Her lips are wet and red, her arms tremble against the ropes that hold them snugly in place, her lips part as she pants. The ropes make a beautiful pattern against her skin, twined around in loops and curls that might almost spell words, in some unknown tongue._

_The moonlight filters down through the bubbling windows, the light scattered where it breaks across the windowpanes. The stone floor is cold, the walls colder, but she is everything that is warm._

_Let us begin._

_Every turn of the rod tightens the ligature around her neck, presses the twisted braid tighter, bites  into that pale skin. The blade passes from hand to hand – let everyone make their mark on what we do here tonight._

_A tug on her hair, and her throat is bared for us. There’s terror in her eyes now, choking sounds falling from those lips, her body shaking._

_The blade flashes in the moonlight, descends, and it’s done, dark and red and wet. One more turn of the cord and her lifeblood sprays, a parody of a climax, salty, heady and hot over our upturned hands and faces._

_“Bless us, mothers; bless us, fathers._

_Cenn Cruaich, Lord, p_ _rotect us from traitors and destroyers._

_The old ways rise again.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **SPOILERS BELOW**
> 
>  
> 
> Three named characters from the Marvel universe are killed off in this fic. Two are offscreen mentions (Marie/Rogue and Dr. Strange), and one is on-screen (Alex Wilder from Runaways). 
> 
> \--
> 
> Original prompt:
> 
> _“I was thinking a crossover between Criminal Minds and Young Avengers, specifically the ProfAU. Something along the lines of a case which is tied to the school and has some occult theme, which leads to Billy being a suspect but also a specialist that the Team work with to find the killer, while Teddy does his best to be Billy's support during the horrific case. Then I have a side note on my notes about how Greg or Nate could be found out to be in the cult._
> 
> _Spencer is my fave, along with Darek and Garcia. On the other side of the fandom, Billy and Teddy as a given, I can see Kate getting involved, and even Tommy in a rare bit of obvious brotherly protectiveness. I did think of one meeting I think would be amazing, Garcia and Darcy should meet up somehow.”_
> 
> Thank you so much for this prompt – I had a huge amount of fun with it! I had to sub in someone else from Billy’s past, because I had Nate and Greg already situated within the universe, but hopefully this worked for you just as well.
> 
> \--
> 
> Cenn Cruaich is one of many names for an Iron Age Celtic deity, supposedly worshipped through human sacrifice. Legend has it that he and some of his devotees were banished to Hell by St. Patrick, during the conversion of the Celts. 
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crom_Cruach


	2. Tuesday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein the BAU gets a case, and Billy gets a phone call.

**FBI Headquarters, Quantico, VA. Office of the Behavioral Analysis Unit.**

 

“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”

-         Oscar Wilde

 

Derek Morgan – FBI agent, profiler, college football star, former bomb-squad officer – was fast on his feet. He had to be, given the line of work he was in. Make a decision too slowly, react that half-second too late, and someone was dead.  

He wasn’t fast enough this time.

“Is that whipped cream?” Emily Prentiss (dark hair, long legs, black fitted pantsuit, _hel_ lo) slid easily into step beside him as he tried to move unobtrusively into the BAU bullpen, two paper coffee cups in hand. She glanced at the logo and flicked a carefully-sculpted eyebrow skyward. “You know you can get coffee here for free, instead of paying five bucks a shot for a watered-down espresso.”

Morgan grinned right back at her and shook his head, not breaking stride. “When they stop buying that bulk crap for the coffee machine, I might start drinking it again.”

There was a little knot of people over by Reid’s desk, and Morgan veered in that direction. Prentiss flung her coat over the back of her chair, still following. “And it’s got nothing at all to do with the cute barista they’ve got working mornings.”

Morgan shook his head and refused to take the bait; give the girl an inch, and she’d be ribbing him about it for weeks. “I got _no_ idea what you’re talking about.”

“Ooh, is that mine?” Garcia was at his elbow and making grabby-hands at the second cup before he could turn, fire-engine red curls cascading from a blue flower perched high on her head. “Gimme.”

He held it out, then pulled the cup back out of her reach. “That’s the last time I do your coffee run. Don’t you think you’re sweet enough already, without adding all that extra caramel-vanilla-mocha crap on top?”

Garcia pouted, but beamed when he caved and handed her the cup anyway. “You don’t mean that, boo.” She popped the top and the smell of about a half-dozen candy flavors hit him all at once.

“Then you need to start drinking something without six different syrup pumps.” A flash of color caught Morgan’s eye and he trailed off, glancing over across the cluster of desks.

“The hand,” Reid said, waving his own hand in front of JJ’s face, before reaching down to pull a second bright red ball from behind her ear, “is quicker than the eye.”

“He’s been practicing a new one,” Garcia explained, and Morgan headed past her, his own cup in hand.

“Watch where you put those, pretty boy,” Morgan joked, just as Reid reached for JJ’s other side. He’d been bouncing two of them in his other hand and dropped them at the sound of Morgan’s voice, scrambling to get them as they rolled under the desk.

Reid flung himself awkwardly at the floor and grabbed for his props as JJ hid a laugh behind a perfectly-manicured hand. “I – ah – didn’t hear you come in,” Reid apologized, but there was something about the look in his eyes that didn’t quite sit right.

“Better work on that one a little more,” Morgan suggested, popping open his coffee and settling down on the edge of Reid’s desk.

“Oh, I don’t know-“ Reid waved his hand over Morgan’s head, that intermittent performer’s-confidence of his back in full-force. There was something cool and smooth at the back of Morgan’s neck and Reid pulled it free, then handed Morgan’s wallet back to him with a grin. “I think I got it pretty down.”

Morgan patted his pocket– but what was the point? He hadn’t even noticed Reid lifting the damn thing. He lifted his cup in a salute, and chuckled warmly. “Alright, you got me.”

“Very nice,” JJ approved, and Reid beamed under the praise.

“It’s the art of misdirection,” he replied, bounced the rubber balls over his knuckles in rapid sequence, and tucked them into his already-bulging pants pocket. “There’s absolutely no way that the hand can physically be quicker than the eye,” Reid began, his eyes alight with enthusiasm, “but when the eye is distracted by something more obvious-“

It was one of those lectures that was bound to start interesting and end up somewhere painful, but Reid trailed off (and was Derek a bad person for being a little bit grateful? No, he was not) when Rossi and Hotch stepped out of Hotch’s office high on the open mezzanine. Their team leader beckoned at them all, then let Rossi precede him into the briefing room.

“We’re up,” Prentiss murmured half under her breath, and Garcia’s broad smile faded into a tight flash of worry.

“After you, ladies,” Morgan gestured to the stairs, rising to his feet. The climb was rhythmic and familiar, the same way each one of these began.

It was easy habit to slide into his usual seat around the dark wooden conference table and watch Hotch do his thing. The board had already been assembled at the front of the room, covered with photographs of crime scenes: three bodies, three dump sites, a map of New York.

“What have we got?” Prentiss asked, the teasing light entirely gone from her eyes.

“Three murders in the past two months,” Hotch answered, the movement of the slim pen in his fingers the only outward sign of emotion. “All the victims were somehow connected to New York City University.

“Benjamin Wyland, 36. An Accounts Payable clerk. He was reported missing when he didn’t show up for work six weeks ago; his body was found that afternoon. Stephen Brock, 24, a grad student, a month after that. Naomi Li’s body was discovered last night. She was 27, a reference librarian. All with the same trauma: signs of strangulation, throats slashed, and then a blow to the head which crushed the skull.”

Prentiss glanced over the images on her tablet with a raised eyebrow. “That’s a ritual signature; you don’t see that kind of multiple MO or that level of precision with an angry kill. Where were the bodies found?”

 “Within five miles of each other, at separate dump sites in Chelsea and Greenwich Village. In two cases, the bodies were found before the victims had even been reported missing.”

“So he’s not keeping them?” Reid asked, leaning forward in his chair.

“Apparently not. Abduction and killing happen within hours of each other. There’s no sign of break-ins or struggle at the residences, so they may have gone willingly, or been taken from somewhere else.”

Morgan drummed his fingers on the table, turning the pieces of the puzzle over in his mind. “Black male, thirties; white male, twenties; asian female, twenties. They didn’t work in the same departments, there’s no real reason for them to intersect. There’s no pattern in age, race or sex – any evidence of sexual assault?” There shouldn’t be, not with a grouping like that, but there was always the chance for a surprise with these guys.

“None,” Hotch confirmed. “And no sexual assault or prolonged torture means he’s not a sexual sadist. They keep their victims for much longer, or replace them sooner. The ritual elements to the killings seem to be the primary focus. And there’s something more.”

Prentiss arched that eyebrow again. “That’s not enough?”

Hotch took a moment to scroll through his tablet and find a particular file. If Morgan didn’t know any better, he’d swear that he was playing up the moment, just a little.

“They found mistletoe pollen in the stomachs of all the victims. Forensic analysis suggests that it was mixed with wine. There was bruising on the nose and mouth of the most recent victim; she may have been forced to drink it.”

So maybe he did deserve the dramatic pause on that one. Garcia looked confused, but JJ was the one who spoke first. “Mistletoe,” she repeated, looking at Hotch for confirmation. “Like the Christmas kissing plant, mistletoe?”

Reid nodded enthusiastically. “Mistletoe actually has a long history of ritual importance, stemming from the first recorded uses in mythological Greece, up through to the modern day. It was a representation of male fertility, used as an antitoxin, or to cure barrenness in farm animals, and there have been a series of recent studies on its potential for use as a cancer treatment.”

“It’s also a rather potent poison, is it not?” Rossi frowned at the paper that had stopped in front of him. “Definitely not something someone would add to a salad.”

“Poison, strangulation, throat slashed _and_ blunt force trauma?” Morgan read out the list of injuries, and whistled low. “That’s some serious overkill, Hotch.”

Hotch nodded grimly. But then, these days, he did just about everything that way. “And the time between kills is shrinking rapidly. Now that local PD are sure that there’s a pattern, they’ve asked us to come in. Wheels up in thirty.”

\--

“Hotch said ‘ritual aspects’” Garcia waved a hand at the set of files on the little table in front of her, then grabbed for them as the jet banked and the pile of paper began to slide. The half-dozen bangle bracelets on her arms jangled and clattered together in a tinkling cacophony as she scrambled to get her files back into her lap.

“You know what?” That was going to be a rhetorical question, and Morgan kept his mouth very firmly shut on the half-dozen responses that popped instantly to mind. “I don’t like this jet anymore. I did at first, when I thought it would be all Hollywood and drink service, but now I know it’s just another exciting way for me to get coffee on my shirt.”

She recovered without needing his help, though, so there wasn’t much to do besides let her keep talking. “So what are the chances that this is some kind of freaky cult thing?” Garcia asked finally.

Rossi and Hotch were only just making their way to their seats from the other end of the plane, so it was up to Morgan to shake his head as Prentiss and Reid settled in. “There’ve never been any proven cases of murder by satanic cults in the US. Whatever this is, it’s not Satanists.”

“If anything, the presence of mistletoe suggests something entirely pre-satanic,” Reid added, folding himself into the empty chair next to Morgan.

Garcia frowned at him.”Why? What has that got to do with it?”

“Along with being endowed with mythical importance by the Greeks, mistletoe was sacred to the druids of pre-Roman England. There are theories, mostly based on some highly dramatized histories written by the Roman conquerors, of course, that the druids were particularly fond of human sacrifice.”

Rossi leaned over the back of Morgan’s chair before joining them, and he nodded in return. “There’s something about the manner of death in these cases; I’ve seen this before, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

“I searched every database I could find, sir,” Garcia objected. “There were a couple of accidental mistletoe poisonings around Christmas – and who puts up real mistletoe when they have little kids in the house, that’s what I’d like to know – but nothing other than a few entirely predictable accidents.”

Rossi settled in across the aisle, and rubbed his chin with his finger. After a moment’s pause, he leaned back in his chair and nodded to Hotch. “I know a guy.”

Of course Rossi did.

Hotch glanced up. “You do?”

 “Bill Kaplan. He teaches medieval history at NYCU. I consulted him last year about that forged illumination in the Christies auction – you remember. He wrote a couple of things on druids.”

Hotch blinked. “You think there could be a connection?”

Rossi tipped his head to one side in that way that meant he was halfway considering what had been said. “I think if someone wants us to believe that there are ancient druids running around sacrificing people, Kaplan’s a good place to start.”

“Fine,” Hotch agreed. There was a shift in the tensions in the group as they came alert, waiting. Garcia was drumming her pen furiously against her armrest until JJ laid a couple of gentle fingers against her arm to still it. Hotch’s eyes flickered toward her briefly, but he didn’t comment.

“Dave,” he continued instead, “you and Reid go talk to Doctor Kaplan. Prentiss and Morgan, start with the most recent crime scene. JJ, I want you to get in touch with the victims’ families and see what they can tell us; I’ll go speak with the college administration about protocols. Following that, you and I will start pulling together the victimology.

“Garcia, I want you setting up at the precinct; you’ll run the command center from there. There’s going to be an immense amount of press coming after this once details of the third body come out, and we need to be on top of that information flow as soon as we’re on the ground. There’s a connection here that goes deeper than just a link to the same college; we need to find out where.”

 

**New York City University, NYC. History Department Offices:**

Cute dorks in cardigans were so standard on campus that an unfamiliar one barely pinged higher than a one on Darcy Lewis’ weird-o-meter. The guy in the ridiculously well-tailored suit and the fancy leather shoes who came in to the office with him, yeah, that was a little more interesting. Pepper was out wrangling allocation committees, which – naturally – left Darcy in charge of dealing with expensive-shoe-and-goatee-guy. It wasn’t nearly as entertaining without a partner in crime to start the betting pool (lawyer, or donation-making-alumnus? $5 said they were in the wrong building), but she could make her own fun if she had to.

She slam-dunked her sparkly pen into the overflowing mug of Bics and sharpies, crossed her legs at the knee and delivered a beaming smile. “Can I _help_ you?”

Cardigan-boy looked startled, Nice-shoes just smiled. Smirked. Flashed a badge. FBI? Sure, that was interesting enough to get her full attention. She sat up straight.

“SSA Rossi, this is Dr. Reid,” he introduced them. Cardigan – _Reid_ – nodded in response. “We’re looking for Dr. Kaplan?”

“Aw,” Darcy flirted reflexively, giving herself a moment to think. Was he in trouble? Did she need to hit up Tommy on the speed-dial as soon as these guys left her office? Bill’s brother was a corporate lawyer, not criminal, but it never hurt to have backup. “Why don’t the cute ones ever come looking for _me_?”

 Rossi took it in stride with a cock of his head and a smile that curled the corner of his lip. “I could, but generally folks are happier to see us going away afterward.”

“We’re with the Behavioural Analysis Unit,” Reid picked up the conversation. He looked like he might actively melt down if she showed any more cleavage than she was currently rocking, and Darcy manfully resisted the urge to test her theory. “We have an appointment with Dr. Kaplan to look over some evidence for a case. Is his office on this floor?”

Assisting law enforcement was a much better option than the others she was currently kind of ashamed that she’d been considering, and the knots in her shoulders untangled themselves. “It is, three doors down and on your right-“

The guys turned to go, and Darcy called after them before they could get past the mailboxes. “But he had a ten-o-clock lecture; he won’t be back yet.”

“That’s fine,” Rossi replied, and he flashed her that flirty and almost-sort-of-familiar grin. Make his hair pale blond instead of dark brown, take off about twenty years and the facial hair... Well, no. Maybe not. The sarcasm sitting right beneath the surface was the same, though. She liked him already. “We’ll wait.”

 

**West Village, NYC:**

 

The small urban garden where the third body had been found was still sealed off from the rest of the street, yellow crime scene tape fluttering in the breeze. Access was through a high iron fence with a single gate, the patio flagstones even and worn smooth around the edges from years of use.

“The restaurant manager came in to open up yesterday, and this is where he found her.” The uniformed officer pointed ahead of him to a chalked-off spot on the patio. “The building was still locked tight, so the killer must have come in through the garden gate.”

Prentiss had the crime scene photos in her hand as she headed over, and Morgan took the moment to stand in the middle and turn, slowly, taking it all in. Carefully planted rows of flowers, tidy garden beds, a tall hedge around the perimeter that cut the garden off from the rest of the busy street. Two steps up at the far end to get in to the fancy bistro. It was too early in the spring for the tables and chairs to be out, which left a wide space open on the patio.

“So she was found here, exactly like this?” Prentiss asked the officer, kneeling to get a better look at the ground beneath them.

“Yes, ma’am. No-one touched her before the forensics guys and the coroner got here.”

“Laid out, palms down, neatly wrapped in linen; that’s reasonably expensive fabric,” Prentiss mused aloud, and Morgan tuned back in, headed over. She stayed crouched but tipped her head up to look at him, her brow furrowed as she worked her options through. “That plays into the ritual theory. Maybe even suggests remorse.”

“He knew her,” Morgan posited, a return salvo in this game they played. “She wasn’t just a warm body. He treated her corpse with respect, and brought her somewhere she would be found reasonably quickly.”

The officer had been watching their back and forth with interest, but replied to that with a question of his own. “That’s a twisted definition of respect. You’re sure she wasn’t killed here?”

“There’s barely any blood,” Prentiss shook her head and rose to her feet. Her hair fell down around her face and she pushed it back without noticing. “With a throat wound of the kind she had? There should be spatter everywhere.”

And there wasn’t. A few smears of blood on the stones, flagged and tagged and photographed from all angles; there should have been a pool of it. He sank into the patterns and the remembered photographs, let the images of the scene play out in his mind’s eye, superimposed on the daytime and the police crew, and Prentiss at his side. The UnSub, carrying the body. She’d have had to have been wrapped at the primary scene; even in New York someone would have noticed a corpse being carried from a car. A bundle that looked like tablecloths or laundry, less likely. He’d come in through the gate-

“Prentiss, look around,” Morgan instructed, as the world snapped back into focus with crystal clarity. “Around the perimeter. What do you see?”

She frowned at him, but played along. “A hedge, stairs, a fence with a gate. The padlock’s been cut, probably with boltcutters.”

“That gate’s heavy iron,” Morgan pointed out, as two of the forensics team headed out to their van. The gate swung closed as soon as they let it go, the latch falling home. “Could you open that and hold it while carrying a body?”

He could see the answer in her eyes the moment she caught on, and Prentiss nodded. “You need one person to hold the gate, another to carry the victim. We’re not looking for one UnSub here; we’re looking for at least two.”

 

**New York City University, NYC. History Department Offices:**

 

“Are you going to go?” Teddy had his arms full, so Billy jogged ahead a couple of steps and pushed the doors open. “It’s what – the fourth time they moved this meeting?”

“I think I have to,” Billy replied apologetically. It wasn’t as though he didn’t have a thousand other things he’d rather be doing, but. “If I don’t, then I’ll have to email Sharon to get the meeting minutes, and that will open a whole new can of worms. I’ll be home by ten, latest.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Teddy shook his head. “I’ve got a pile of research notes to go through before bed. I’ll still be up.”

And speaking of meetings and running late for things –

Billy recognized one of the men waiting outside his office door, but not the other, and if he looked over their shoulders he could see Darcy waving her arms at him through the window of the department office. The younger guy with the leather messenger bag glanced back over his shoulder, as though following Billy’s line of sight, and Darcy vanished abruptly from view.

“Who is that?” Teddy asked, juggling his pile of books into one arm to fish in his pocket for his office keys. “Are they waiting for you, or Eli?”

“They’re for me; it’s the FBI,” Billy replied, and he ran through the memory of Agent Rossi’s phone call from this morning. He hadn’t had a chance to mention it before running to lecture, and then the whole thing had slipped his mind. Rossi had said something about a case, and asking questions about evidence-

“FBI?” Teddy looked at him with faked alarm. It would have looked real to someone who didn’t know his tells, but there was that half of an eyebrow lift and the shadow of a dimple. “Billy, what did you _do_?”

Billy put on an innocent face. “Why do you always assume I did something?”

“Well, half the time-“

“There’s faith and trust for you.”

“I have absolute faith that I can trust you to be in the epicenter of everything.”

They were within easy earshot now, and Billy didn’t reply, stepping forward to shake Rossi’s extended hand. “Agent Rossi. It’s been – what? About a year?” He looked about the same as he had the first time he’d shown up at Billy’s office door, a fake page from a medieval bible in hand and a half-dozen questions about paints.

Rossi had the aura of a mafia don, something in the slicked-back dark hair, hints of salt in the pepper, the carefully trimmed goatee, the signet ring and expensive clothes. He would snap one day, for sure; he’d leave a horse head in someone’s bed, and his own team would end up chasing him down.

The guy he’d brought with him – the one he was introducing now as ‘Dr. Spencer Reid’ – couldn’t have been more his opposite. He was as tall as Teddy but half the width, all elbows and long floppy hair and a vague aura of discomfort.

“Doctor Reid,” Billy extended his hand but Reid didn’t take it, giving a little wave instead. Billy stood there like a goob with his hand stuck out, then dropped it, because, _awkward_.

Teddy hadn’t flinched, shaking Rossi’s hand instead as Billy waved vaguely back and forth between them all. “David Rossi, my husband, Ted Altman.” To his credit, Rossi didn’t even blink, just shook Teddy’s hand with as much easy affability as he had shown Billy.

“That’s new,” Rossi said, pitching it somewhere between a statement and a question, his gaze dropping down to glance at the gold band circling Billy’s finger, the match to the one on Teddy’s.

“The guy isn’t.” Billy had to stop and flash a grin at Teddy. “But the ring is. We got married over winter break.”

Rossi nodded. “Congratulations,” he offered up, and tipped his head a little when he looked up at Teddy. “You teach here as well?”

“That I do,” Teddy agreed, then glanced at his watch with a frown. “Though not for much longer if I don’t get moving. I’ll see you later?” He directed that last at Billy, and Billy nodded vehemently.

“Neither wind nor rain, etc., etc.”

Teddy flickered a glance at the agents as he leaned in a little. Billy circumvented that particular hesitation by grabbing the lapel of his blazer and bringing him in for a gentle goodbye kiss. Rossi was fine, and if Reid had issues, he was cordially invited to bite him.

The moment was over in a split second without any reaction from anyone. Teddy headed into his own office, leaving the three of them alone in the hall. Billy patted his pockets down for his keys, then pushed the office door open onto the evidence of a maelstrom.

It wasn’t as though he _preferred_ the mess, exactly. It was just that there never seemed to be enough hours in the day to both work in the office and clean the office, and the one always took precedence over the other. He shifted a couple of piles of papers off of the guest chairs, looking around for a moment before setting them on top of another half-teetering stack of notes that he’d been supposed to get back to Kate weeks ago. She was going to murder him and dance on his grave, one of these days.

“So,” Billy began, once there was a reasonably clear path and a couple of places to sit. Rossi settled into one, but Reid stayed standing, his eyes wandering over the bookshelves that lined pretty much all of his available wall space. “You mentioned something about a case, in your email, but you didn’t give me much detail. What is it that you think I can help with?” Because of all the people in the history department, his field was probably about the furthest you could go from modern-day relevance before you hit Classics at the other end of the hall.

“It might be nothing.” Rossi sounded nonchalant, but he opened the bag he’d been carrying and pulled out a file folder. “Or it might be something. We could use your perspective.”

He wasn’t sure what he was going to find when he flipped the cover open, but the injury diagram wasn’t it. There were a couple of photographs included as well, bodies curled up in the fetal position and lying on the ground, yellow tape and little plastic tags all around them. He had the sinking feeling that these wouldn’t be anywhere near the worst of the pictures that the FBI had, and the thought turned his stomach over.

Billy felt himself flinch, couldn’t help it. He kept reading the descriptions, though, even as Rossi gestured halfway between them like he was offering to take it back.

He didn’t. It was all a little bit familiar, but the bodies in these pictures were way too new, way too fresh. Autopsy results; head, neck, pollen–

Oh. Maybe it was some kind of prank, or a recreation; were they testing him for some other reason?

“This is Lindow Man,” Billy said, after the silence had gone on for a minute too long.

“Lindow Man?” Rossi asked, his eyes narrowing.

“An early version of this.” It was at once impossible to tear his eyes away from the photos, and churning his gut to even contemplate them, and Billy closed the file so that he didn’t have to see it. “Lindow Man was an English bog find, about two thousand years old,” he explained, and the memories started to filter back in as he spoke, his confidence growing as the old project reshaped itself behind his eyes.

“A crew dug him up back in 1984, along with another body that had been buried in the same place. He was killed just like this: strangled with a garrotte – sinew, in that case – his throat cut, and his head smashed in with a blunt object. The forensics team at the university found mistletoe pollen in his gut, along with charred bread, probably a burnt-offering. It suggests that he was part of some kind of religious ceremony before he died.”

He could practically smell the chemicals from the preservation, see John’s hastily scribbled notes spreading across their shared workbench, hear the underlying thrum of the machines and the low droning voice of the post-doc running the lab. “I worked with the find on a project back in my grad student days,” he explained quickly, in case his wandering off into the realms of memory had been noticed. Rossi’s eyes were sharp; Billy didn’t think he missed much.

“The English bog bodies,” Reid repeated, and it looked like about a thousand neurons were firing off all at once behind his eyes; he was a little glazed over, staring into the space behind Billy’s desk like the answers were hanging there in the air. “There was an article in the New York Times about six years ago, a book coming out on the implications of the finds.”

“That was us,” Billy nodded. “I’m just a footnote on that one. Doctor Stephen Strange–“ Rossi’s eyebrow went up and a grin tugged at his lips. Billy shrugged and spread his hands, as if to say ‘what can you do?’, and flashed a small smile back. “My PhD supervisor. He put all of us to work on the research phase. The conclusion was that at least some of the bog bodies had been killed as a way to gain favour from the Celtic pantheon.”

He'd loved that project, from the travel to the crummy apartments they'd rented; even the tedium that had set in over the manuscripts had been alleviated by the novelty of the whole thing. The pages had smelled of dust and vanilla, the ink so old it had faded to sepia generations ago. He'd woken up in the mornings eager to begin (though never as eager as John; he'd been convinced the secrets of the ages lay between each and every one of those ancient tomes. Marie had rolled her eyes at both of them), and exhilarated when they'd break for dinner, the four of them sprawled easily in the same corner booth as the Rose and Lion, heady English beer leaving the taste of victory on his lips.

Reid faded back in to reality with a slow nod. “You suspected druids.”

“It’s mostly conjecture,” Billy threw in there, to keep them objective. “But yes; the general belief is that the religious structure of pre-Christian Britain included the use of blood sacrifice as a way to petition the gods for favors. Lindow Man may have been a voluntary sacrifice, giving up his life in order to halt the Roman advance.”

“Looks like the gods weren’t listening too closely on that one,” Rossi smirked, and behind him, Reid continued his slow perusal of Billy’s office.

“Not so much, no,” Billy agreed easily. “But it must have worked at least some of the time, or they wouldn’t have kept it up as a practice. The rituals would have been used for specific requests: protection, or success in an upcoming battle. If the gods were pleased by your sacrifice, you’d get your boon. Like... a bloody version of tech support, for the real world. But you paid them off in bodies, not donuts.”

They were in the realm of the theoretical now, which was much more comfortable, but not exactly the sort of thing that they’d come here for. “So do you have any theories about who might be doing this?” It wasn’t like they were actually about to tell him if they actually had a suspect. But then, if they had a suspect, they wouldn’t be hanging out in his office, asking about Iron Age mythology.

“That’s what we’re hoping you could help us with, actually,” Reid interjected. He stood by Billy’s bookcase and rested one finger idly on the spine of a book before he pulled it away and pushed his hands back into his pockets. “According to formal surveys in 2008, approximately 4% of Americans identify as some form of pagan, and 30,000 of those are Druids. While any more refined statistics are unavailable, it seems highly likely that New York would have a reasonably-sized neopagan community. While most groups are inherently peaceful or even pacifistic–”

Where had Reid even _come_ from? Billy had assumed he was a forensics expert, considering the whole FBI thing, but he sounded more like a statistician. Or Commander Data.

“If you’re asking me if it’s possible that modern druids are bumping people off in order to protect New York from Roman invasion?” Billy cut him off, not waiting for Reid to finish his theories and statistics. He’d never been interested in paganism beyond the abstract, but looking for murder suspects based on their religion? There was good reason for a Kaplan to get seriously twitchy at the idea. “Not a chance. At least, not the kind you’re probably thinking of. Modern druids are based on a nineteenth-century Romantic movement, not Getafix from Asterix. They’re environmentalists, Dr. Reid. I think half of them are vegans,” he added as an afterthought. “Whoever your murderer is, he’s not exactly the ‘respect for all life’ sort of guy.”

Rossi just looked at him for a moment, evaluating, and Billy pushed the file folder back across his desk, avoiding the pile of books on the corner. Rossi took it and nodded in thought. “Who else can you think of who might have the background to do something like this? Who would be familiar enough with the bog bodies to be able to recreate the circumstances of their deaths?”

Billy shook his head. “The BBC’s made a couple of documentaries, so frankly, anyone who watches the history channel could get a basic overview. It’s a little old, but not all that obscure.” Rossi and Reid were still waiting, though, and he kept going, filling the silence. “As for academics and specialists... myself, obviously. Any of the medievalists in town. Kate Bishop is our other one in this department, but there are probably about thirty of us at the various colleges, and that’s not even including the MARC over at NYU.”

“How about your former supervisor? The other members of the project?”

“None of them are in town. Marie went to Canada; she had a tenure-track offer at UBC. John stayed to do a  post-doc in Ireland. Stephen retired years ago. The last I heard, he’s living it up on a beach somewhere in Aruba. He always hated snow.”

His office door swung open, and a familiar dark head poked around the jamb. “Doctor K?” And he’d managed to forget Alex, in the middle of everything else. Right. Focus, Kaplan.

“Hang on a minute.” Billy glanced at Rossi and Reid for a cue. “That’s my PhD student; we’ve got a meeting.”

Rossi rose to his feet in an easy motion. “Not a problem; I think we’re done for now.” Billy stood as well, coming close to knocking his half-empty coffee cup over with his elbow. They shook hands again, Rossi’s grip cool and firm. “We need you to be as discreet as possible; don’t share any of the details. We can’t risk compromising the investigation.” He waited for Billy’s hurried nod, then, “can we call you if we have other questions?”

Part of him wanted to say no, to keep murder and bloody bodies out of his office, put them back into the realms of the distant and theoretical where they belonged. He found himself nodding anyway. “Yeah, of course. I’m not going anywhere.”

He stood to see them out and let Alex in. Something was pulling at him, though; the way Reid had stood and taken the office in, like he was cataloging everything. He’d stopped at the bookcase, gotten distracted– Billy stood in the same place, let his hand fall where Reid’s had fallen.  

“What was all that about?” Alex asked, settling in to his usual chair and busying himself with unpacking his laptop. He was easily Billy’s favourite of the handful of students he had at the moment, all sharp edges and sly wit and carefully-contained brilliance. He would love this sort of thing, the gritty details of the case, the intricacies of the profilers’ work and the human drama of it all. And Billy had just promised not to talk about anything.  

“Nothing important,” Billy replied, distracted. _Analyzing Margery: the Mystic and the Autobiography_ , by Dr. Diana Reid. It was lit crit, an older book, but still a good one; he’d picked it up for a class and only ended up using one of the chapters. The author had stopped publishing years ago, which was a real shame; she’d been very good. Now why–

He flipped it open, Alex’s voice behind him fading into background noise. There it was, on the dedication page, and a piece of a puzzle he hadn’t been consciously working on snapped tightly into place.

‘ _To Spencer,’_ it read. ‘ _[Son], I shall make all the world wonder at you.’_

**Sixth Precinct, NYPD, NYC:**

 

The precinct was a chaotic mess, like they often were, but with a kind of poetry all of its own. At least they’d been given a decent-sized room in the back to set up their gear, and JJ had sweet-talked the desk sergeant into moving a coffee machine in as well. Garcia’s laptops had taken over half the table already, and she was muttering under her breath as she typed.

Hotch had the first two victims’ files spread out across the table in front of him, and he nodded thanks at JJ when she handed him the third. He looked like hell, grim-faced and circles under his eyes, but that – along with Foyet, and Haley’s death –was one of those things that they didn’t talk about.

“I just had Naomi Li’s parents on the phone,” JJ opened, and took her seat to Hotch’s left. “According to them, she moved here last year to take her current job. Naomi’s also her middle name. Until moving to New York, she went by Lily.”

Hotch looked up at that, his interest piqued. “Why the change?”

“Bad boyfriend,” JJ replied, and Garcia winced behind her screens. “She applied for a restraining order against one ‘Rob Chang’ about sixteen months ago, and I guess she decided that wasn’t enough protection. And before you ask-“ she held up a hand. “I checked. He’s still back in L.A., serving a year-less-a-day for beating up his next girlfriend. He’ll be behind bars for another ten months, at least.”

“Super-classy,” Garcia commented, her mouth set in a thin line.

Hotch tapped lightly on the table, and nodded. “Our first victim, Ben Wyland. His parents died last year, and he doesn’t appear to have much of a life outside work.”

“His daytimer shows an introvert’s dream life,” Garcia piped in, “work, home, work, home. Cell phone records are appallingly sparse, and while he apparently used to be a member of a local gospel church, he stopped going after his parents’ deaths.”

“The second victim wasn’t exactly social either,” Hotch picked up the thread of the conversation again. “Brock was retired military, going back to school on the GI bill. As far as we can tell, he wasn’t in contact with his family.”

His file was open and JJ flipped through it, pulling out a couple of typed pages. Ankle, wrist, ribs–“His medical records show some old fractures,” she pointed out, though Hotch probably already knew it. “Some of these, the age and placement – they’re consistent with childhood abuse.”

“Ugh,” came the grunt from Garcia’s end of the table. “Why are people gross? Tell me that, JJ. Why?”

JJ couldn’t help the small smile, however inappropriate it might be in the moment. “If I knew, Pen, we’d all be out of jobs.”

“I would be surprisingly okay with that.”

Hotch stood and headed for the board, folding his arms as he stared down the careful collage of photographs and notes, the colorful splotches of post-its. “So what have we got? Three victims, all connected to NYCU in some way. No evidence that any of them knew each other. None of them have strong local ties, or close family.”

“All of them lived alone,” Garcia added, turning to her second screen and pulling up more records.    

It was the perfect combination, really, and it all came back to the option they’d all but dismissed earlier that morning. “Disconnected, orphaned, or disowned,” JJ said aloud. “That made them all socially vulnerable.”  

Hotch nodded, his jaw firmly set. “The ideal targets for a charismatic predator, or a killing team. JJ, get addresses. We need to take a look at the victims’ homes. Garcia, check the computers and cell phones as well and see if they have any mutual contacts. Check social media as well as private messaging and texts. This UnSub isn’t grabbing people off the streets; he’s luring them in. And gaining their trust will have taken time. Something will have been left behind.”

 

**New York City University, NYC. History Department Offices:**

 

It had taken ages for Billy to even find his old files, and the pieces from his grad-level work still lingering on his hard drive were few and far between. Teddy could tease him about being an information pack-rat all he liked, but there were times when he wished he was even more of one. Eight years and three cities in between didn’t help.

There was the book, of course, but the FBI would already have a copy of that on hand; going through it wouldn’t tell him anything more than it would tell them. All the interesting things happened behind the scenes, anyway.

And what had ‘behind the scenes’ meant, back then?  Three grad students holed up in a tiny shared office in the bowels of the British Museum, working through endless Roman and Irish histories, flagging references to ancient priests in texts left by the people who had defeated them, and the monasteries that had made them obsolete. It had been the perfect storm of prejudice and propaganda, wrapped up in layers of obscure mysticism and fear.

Other than their team, who had been there? The curator. The lab manager. Anyone and everyone who had any kind of official access to the museum, for God’s sake. This was a dead end.

Billy groaned and stretched, leaning back in his chair until it balanced on two legs and he felt his shoulders pop. He grabbed the phone, punched in an office extension through sheer muscle memory.

He got her voice mail, which was just about par for the course. “Hey, Kate,” he spoke with a little more cheer than he felt. “I have a thing, I could use your thoughts. Do you know if anyone in town is doing any work on bog bodies? Pete Driscoll had the paper on the Danish ones about five years ago, but I need the English cases. I’ll be in and out all afternoon, so text me if you get this before I see you.”

So that was done; if anyone was working on anything, Kate would know. She had the whole networking thing down to an art form, something Billy had never quite mastered.

What was left? Stephen had sent all his crap to Billy when he'd retired. Billy had found a few useful things, then shoved the rest into the hands of the archivists; let them deal with the reams of scribbled pages and leather-bound notebooks. Those raw notes were long gone, buried somewhere in the archives in Steve’s endless bankers’ boxes of files.

Or were they? If he was extremely lucky, then there was a chance at one more thing – he tapped at the library website for a few minutes, then stabbed at his phone again, a different number this time.

“Alex? It’s Doctor Kaplan. I have to run to a meeting, but can you do me a favor? Yeah. There are some microfilm records down in the archives I want to take a look at. Call numbers should be – you have a pen? Yeah. FILM-R7125 and R7128. No, they should be there. I can’t imagine anyone’s looked at those in years. Yeah. Take a dust mask,” he laughed. “Sure thing. See you tomorrow.”

And that was his alarm going off, which meant he had ten minutes to get to tutorial. Billy grabbed his bag and slung it over his shoulder, letting his office door click shut behind him.

The phone rang, once, twice. And then it fell silent.

 

**Library Archives, Special Collections, New York City University.**

NYCU was a jumbled mix of old and new buildings, repurposed private residences nestled in between rebuilt modern glass-walled edifices that half-blocked the sun. The archive was somewhere in the middle, a lump of brutalist concrete that squatted, toad-like, on one end of the alley. It was the dump zone for overflow, physical journals that no-one read anymore, book donations that they couldn’t find space for but couldn’t dispose of, spools of microfilm and pages of microfiche rotting away in the dark.

Alex hated it. And he loved it. There was nowhere near enough money to make the archive into the kind of building that it should be, with environmental controls and proper readers, but at the same time it was like a little secret, a treasure room that was all his.

The sun had set by the time he’d made it over from the main library, the argon-yellow streetlights picking out sections of the pavement. Security knew him; they knew all the grad students who were in and out of the place at weird hours, and he didn’t expect any more than the curt nod that he got from Brian at the front desk.

University policy meant the lights got turned down after eight, only a few bulbs still glowing dimly along the length of the hallway. Alex passed the closed information desk and headed down toward the stairs; microfilm was in the basement, of _course_. The back of his neck prickled, an uneasy feeling of alarm. He snapped his head around, but there was nothing at all behind him. Just Brian texting on his phone, and the closed front door.

The heavy fire door squeaked loudly when he pulled it open, the screech echoing off the metal staircase on the other side. He jumped at the sound, then rolled his eyes. “Nice,” he muttered under his breath. Served him right for watching the horror marathon on the weekend; he was making himself jumpy.  

He turned at the landing and he heard his last step echo up the stairwell behind him. And then a shuffle that wasn’t from him.

Alex looked up, but there was nothing above him. Not that he could see in the half-light, anyway, the glooming shadows at the top of the poorly-lit stairs and the metal railings blocking the rest of the stairwell from his view.

Right. Whatever.

He had half a flight to go, and he took the steps down two at a time. It wasn’t because he wanted to get out of the stairwell faster; it was just more expedient to do it this way. Only babies were afraid of the dark.

The echo kept pace with him, then it got faster, and it wasn’t an echo at all but someone actually behind him, someone who didn’t answer back when Alex stopped to call up the stairs.

Two lights, or reflections off glass, there at the top of the stairs and then gone.

There was a flash of dark blue behind him, a shadow just out of sight. Alex spun on his heel, saw the arm, the cudgel, the familiar face-

Pain blossomed red and white, in his head, in his brain, in every part of him. Pain and anger and _betrayal._

Then there was nothing but the cold and black.

 

**Greenwich Village, NYC:**

 

The feeling of his key sliding into the apartment lock was probably one of the best feelings in the world. It was right up there, Billy decided, with the hot cup of coffee that Teddy pushed into his hands in the morning in that span of hazy time between ‘vertical’ and ‘conscious.’ It ranked one or two steps below ‘kissing Teddy,’ but had the distinct and beautiful honor of making that one possible.

Light shone into the hallway from the living room door, and Billy dropped his bag and kicked off his shoes before dragging his sorry carcass down toward it. Teddy was sitting cross-legged on the couch typing on his laptop, a book open beside him and a stack of papers on the floor. He glanced up when Billy entered, and shifted the book aside without a word.

Billy dropped his glasses onto the coffee table, flopped over the arm of the couch and sprawled there. His head rested against Teddy’s thigh and his knees were crooked over the arm, and he took a wordless minute to let the tension ebb out of his shoulders and revel in the feeling of being _home_.

“Long day?” Teddy asked after a minute, and he brushed the hair back out of Billy’s face with a gentle sweep of his hand.

“The longest. Whoever decided that everything should be decided by committee needs to be taken out back and shot. I’m going to put in a proposal for a return to benevolent dictatorship. It may lapse into tyranny, but at least it won’t take two hours to decide on whether to add a new course. Not, I might add–” he held up a finger in emphasis, and Teddy raised an eyebrow at him, “ _what_ said course will actually be, just whether we’re even going to look in to adding more courses at all.”

“And the final answer was...?”

“I have no idea. I tuned out when the subject changed to TA stipends and how we can’t afford to hire any more of those, either.”

Billy fell silent, closing his eyes. Teddy’s fingers dragged through his hair, slow and warm, drawing the tension in his body out through the roots. “Mmm. I love your hands. Keep doing that.”

Teddy stopped.

Billy cracked an eye open and glared up at his husband’s stupid perfect face and the stupidly angelic smile he had on.

“You didn’t say the magic word,” Teddy informed him sagely.

“Remind me again why I married you?”

“I have it on good authority that it had something to do with my hands.”

It was hard to dispute that, really, when Teddy’s fingers slipped back into his hair, and drew gentle circles on his scalp. It was hard to dispute _anything_ when it felt that good, the edges of the world going fuzzy and his body half-melding to the contours of the couch.

Billy was half-way to sleep by the time Teddy spoke again. “You had a phone call this evening.”

“Hmm? Who was it?”

“Didn’t say. Just hung up when I said you weren’t home.”

Teddy’s hand slowed down when he spoke, and Billy pushed against him to make him keep petting. “Probably a telemarketer.”

“So what was with the FBI this morning?”

That was enough to jar him back into wakefulness. The images flooded back, the carefully chosen photos, staged to give him the information he needed while sparing him the worst of the horror, but terrible and bloody nevertheless.

Billy shivered, and Teddy’s fingers curled tighter into his hair. “Bee?”

“They wanted my opinion on some evidence for a case.” Billy tried to keep his voice casual; there was no sense in freaking Teddy out as well. But–

God. What if he didn’t say anything, and Teddy was targeted? Rossi had said ‘keep it quiet,’ and who was Teddy going to tell? “There’ve been some murders, on campus,” Billy confessed. Teddy froze and Billy rolled over, resting his chin on his forearms. “This guy – he strangled them. Cut their throats. Bashed their heads in with something heavy. Staged them like ritual sacrifices.” _Not only merely dead, they’re really most sincerely dead._  His stomach churned and he felt on the edge of nausea.

Teddy breathed out, a hiss between his teeth. “ _Jesus_ , Bill; how many? At NYCU? Why hasn’t it been in the news?”

“Three so far, and they don’t want to start a panic, I suppose.” He ducked his head and rested it against the solid mass of Teddy’s thigh. The denim of his jeans was soft against Billy’s face, and he nuzzled in. “The pictures were awful. It’s one thing working on preserved skeletal remains, or six hundred year old death rolls, but when it’s real people I probably saw on the bus every day– it’s different,” he finished lamely.

“No kidding.” Teddy was subdued, quiet and turning inward, and Billy scrubbed his thumb across the seam of his jeans to bring him back.

“Be careful, alright?” It was foolish, but he needed to say it.

He got a frown back from Teddy for his trouble, and there was a line creasing between his brows. “You too.” His eyes had gone dark and he swallowed, his adam’s apple bobbing in his throat.

“No-“ _No getting yourself killed. No getting caught off-guard. You’re not allowed to get hurt._ “No getting into cars with strange men,” Billy teased, the words thick in his throat.

“Too late,” Teddy replied solemnly. The thick tension cleared a little, and the light started to fade back into his eyes. “I already went home with the strangest one around.”

Billy snorted and pushed himself forward so that his head was in Teddy’s lap, tipping his laptop off his leg at a precarious angle. “You’re worse than a cat,” Teddy grumbled good-naturedly, but set his computer aside. He rubbed slow and gentle circles around Billy’s temples, and Billy closed his eyes.

“They’ll catch him,” Teddy said after a few minutes, with false certainty that was probably supposed to be reassuring. It was, sort of. “The experts are here, they’ll analyse the DNA and rotoscope the security footage and dust for noseprints, or whatever is it they do, and they’ll get him. And that’s probably the last we’ll ever hear of it.”

Billy curled in under his touch, and nodded. Teddy was magic; he knew the right things to say to make everything but _this_ seem inconsequential. “I’m sure you’re right.”

\--

_He’s driving fast; good boy. He’s following directions so perfectly._

_It’s almost a shame._

_He’s driving fast, but it’s not fast enough. The turnoff’s next but he’s not paying attention; with the lights off he doesn’t notice anything behind him._

_His lights are bright in the dark of night, red eyes in the black._

_This road is silent, the trees stand witness._

_He’s panicking, weaving in the road; a scared little rabbit noticing the big bad wolf._

_Highbeams on now. Time to run, little rabbit._

_See how far you get._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ronald Hutton is a real person, teaching at the University of Bristol. He has two books out on the Druids, which have been reasonably well-received critically. His first book is quite short and written in a nicely accessible popular-history style. Hutton, Ronald. _The Druids._ London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007. http://www.amazon.com/dp/1852855339.  
>  His more academically-oriented follow-up is titled Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain. Hutton, Ronald. _Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain._ New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Mistletoe-History-Druids-Britain/dp/0300170858/
> 
> \--
> 
> The MARC at NYU is the Medieval and Renaissance Center at New York University, an interdisciplinary school focused entirely on Medieval and Renaissance studies. I would like to live there. http://marc.as.nyu.edu/
> 
> \-- 
> 
> Diana Reid’s book is fictional, but Margery Kempe is not. The quote in Diana’s dedication is a paraphrase of a quote from Margery’s description of her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where she recorded her memory of God’s words at her conversion. “Daughter, I shall make all the world wonder at you.” (Triggs, Tony (trans.). _The Book of Margery Kempe_ , Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England: Burns and Oates, 1995. 72)


	3. Wednesday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Billy gets investigated. Also, smutty bits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, many, many thanks to my betas, khirsah and feebleapb. They are magnificent.

**Library Archives, Special Collections, New York City University.**

 

“The librarian called it in when she opened up this morning.” Morgan lifted the crime tape enough to let Prentiss slide under, and she joined him on the stairs. “Victim’s name is Alex Wilder; he was doing his PhD here.”

“Which explains why he was in the archives at ten’o’clock at night,” Prentiss commented, sliding booties on over her shoes before jogging down to the next landing. The crime scene guys were still all over the place, taking photographs and measuring blood pools, and Morgan stayed back enough to let Prentiss go down and take a look without adding to the congestion.

It was a familiar enough sight; the concrete floor, a dark red stain of oxidized blood, the spatter up the walls that had been missing from the first three scenes, a dragging trail that ended abruptly at the foot of the stairs.

Prentiss leaned on the banister and looked up, and he grinned down at her from his higher vantage point. “So where’s the body?” she asked, and he tipped his chin to point up the stairs.

“Out back. Dumped outside, like all the others. Hotch and Rossi are over there talking to the coroner now.” She stayed where she was, watching and thinking, and after a moment he cracked and went down to meet her, instead.

She spoke without turning to look at him, wheels turning behind her eyes. “What’s so different about this one?” Prentiss asked, and he was half-sure that it was a rhetorical question.

He answered it anyway. “It’s the first time they’ve left a body on college property, and the first time we even have a primary.”

“They were in a rush.” Prentiss drummed her fingers on the railing. “Someone interrupted the ritual?”

And even that didn’t sit right. “The location, the lack of cleanup, everything’s all wrong. The last three kills were methodical. The first three – there was overkill, sure, but they were cleaned, wrapped up, the UnSubs hid their primary sites. The aggression level of this kill is far higher. Much less methodical. This is sloppy.”

“Someone panicked,” Prentiss finished his thought for him. “Wilder wasn’t a planned kill. So there’s the question,” she poked Morgan in the shoulder as they started to climb back up. “Is this a copycat from someone who knows about the other murders, or is this actually the same UnSubs?”

The thought curled around Morgan’s brain, sunk its teeth in and hung on. “Or Wilder was the UnSub’s partner, and he’s started to clean house.”

The hallway was only slightly less chaotic than downstairs, uniformed officers talking with archive staff, and they turned in the opposite direction. Prentiss hung back to speak to someone, and Morgan turned the corner without her. The back stairs led out to an alley between buildings, a white-shrouded body lying still on the paved ground. The coroner was deep in discussion with one of her assistants, Hotch and Rossi standing by.

“The position of the body is all wrong,” Morgan pointed out as he joined the others. “Is this how he was found?”

Hotch nodded. “Fetal position, knees curled up, palms together.”

“Like he was praying?” Morgan asked, and the implications of the change made the new theory that much more viable. “That scene downstairs was a mistake. If these are the same UnSubs, their MO is changing.”

“They’re escalating; decompensating.” That was Rossi’s entry into the conversation, and his eyes were shadowed.

Hotch knelt down to look at the body again, lifting one corner of the sheet with his pen. Morgan caught a glimpse of dark skin and the tight curls of a natural afro, matted and thick with dried blood. “The manner of death looks to be the same as the others,” Hotch said, “but we need to wait for the coroner’s report before jumping to any conclusions.”

“Jumping to conclusions? The other murders have been kept out of the media so far; there’s no evidence of a leak that could inspire a copycat. Hotch, these are our guys.” There were times to be cautious and times to take what you knew and run with it before anybody else got hurt. Hotch _knew_ that, damn it. “And if one of them’s already started to lose control, we could be looking at a lot more bodies.”

“Then the question becomes,” Hotch answered, and holy hell, maybe he’d been listening after all. “How is Wilder connected?”  

“It may be coincidence,” Rossi sounded reluctant to speak, but he shook his head and kept going. “But I met him yesterday. Bill Kaplan is his thesis advisor.”

“Bill Kaplan the expert on druids?” Morgan asked. Now that was a connection that was too good, too easy. “Rossi, what if he’s the dominant on the kill team? He knows we’re looking for him, so he panics. While we’re off chasing cell phone records and apartment keys, he’s cleaning up the evidence and getting rid of his partner.”

Prentiss joined them, the booties gone and her expression thoughtful. "I just spoke with Detective Dias; there's a whole row of microfilms missing from downstairs. They’re going to check the catalogues and see what was on them."

Hotch was on the phone before Prentiss finished speaking, and the glance that passed between Hotch and Rossi was weighted with about a thousand different things that Morgan couldn’t name. “Garcia,” Hotch began, and Rossi turned and walked away. “I need you and JJ to pull everything you can find on Alex Wilder. And on Doctor William Kaplan. Yes, the one at NYCU. We’re coming in.”

 

**Sixth Precinct, NYPD, NYC:**

 

“Talk to me.” Hotch wasted no time at all as they walked in. JJ, Garcia and Reid were already there, paper spilling out of the printer and new images up on the board.

JJ stayed standing at the front as the rest took their seats around the long conference table. “Alex Wilder, 25. He’s an only child. His parents, Geoffrey and Catherine, are both businesspeople in L.A. He moved to New York at 18 to go to NYU, and started his doctorate under Dr. Kaplan at NYCU last year. He doesn’t match the profiles of the other victims at all, Hotch. By all accounts he was a good kid. Solid grades, a handful of close friends, on the grad student council; he’s part of the local community.” She sat, then, shaking her head. “The only connection he has to any part of this case is a vaguely similar manner of death... and his work with Dr. Kaplan.”

“So tell me about Kaplan,” Hotch asked, with a glance at Reid.

“Doctor William Kaplan, 35,” Reid began. “Adopted as an infant, has a biological twin and two adoptive brothers. His parents are both still alive, employed and married. All indications suggest a relatively stable childhood and home life, no evidence of any abuse. He has an undergraduate degree from Princeton, and a doctorate in medieval history from Boston University. His research focus is medieval belief systems surrounding the occult, paranormal and supernatural.”

“There’s a difference?” Prentiss asked, and Reid nodded with enthusiasm, gesturing as he spoke.

“Actually, yes. They’re commonly used as synonyms, but mean different things. ‘Paranormal’ refers to phenomena outside the realm of contemporary scientific knowledge – which in the medieval context would include things like solar eclipses – whereas ‘supernatural’ denotes events which specifically contravene the laws of physics.”

“Reid-“ Hotch said, with a hint of impatience in his voice.

“Right. Dr. Kaplan is one of approximately twenty academics presently in the United States with direct physical experience with the Lindow Man find, which appears to be the UnSub’s inspiration. He has all the first-hand knowledge required to recreate the manner of death.”

“You’ve met him, Rossi,” Prentiss turned to face him. “Has he got the physical strength to do this? Wilder was reasonably fit, young; Brock was former military, and trained in hand to hand. Neither of them would have been easy to overpower.”     

“This kill was a blitz attack,” Morgan replied. “You wouldn’t need to be that strong to catch him off guard, especially if they were partners.”

“He could do it. From a vantage point on the stairs, even Reid could do it.”

“Hey!”

“But carrying Wilder up three flights?” Rossi grinned a little but otherwise ignored Reid’s protest. “I’m not so sure. And Brock, no. His partner would have to be a big guy, have some combat training. Kaplan’s average height, not a sports guy. It’d be possible, but not easy.”

JJ folded her arms and stared down the table. “Dr. Kaplan knows the case, and he would have access to all the buildings on campus. As faculty it would be easy to gain the victims’ trust at least long enough to catch them off guard. But what’s his motive?”

Reid leaned back in his chair. “There are no obvious triggers here.” He said it like a confession, like he was sure he’d missed something – though the chances of that were somewhere close to nil. “Phone records show that he’s in regular contact with his family, he was granted tenure last year, and married over Christmas. Change in marital and employment status are both stressors, but in this case they’re all positive ones.”

“Reid, Dave, you were in his office yesterday.” Hotch turned his full attention to Reid and Rossi. “Did you notice anything there that might be suggestive?”

Reid stared into the space above their conference table and his eyes glazed over just that little extra bit. “Dr. Kaplan’s office is cluttered, but not in a hoarding sense. He has notes for collaborative projects on his desk; he works well with others. Family photographs, pictures of friends, mementoes, letters of reference.” Reid snapped back in to focus and shook his head.

“There’s nothing about his primary environment that suggests the kind of focused fanaticism that we’re looking for. If anything, his office suggests a level of self-confidence that our UnSub couldn’t _have_. Dr. Kaplan doesn’t care how he’s perceived by others as long as he’s surrounded by the things and people he cares for, while this killer is crying out for attention. He displays his victims; he’s deliberately putting on a show.”

 “You said he just got married; what about the wife?” Prentiss asked. “Could she be the partner? We’ve seen killer couples before.”

“Husband, actually,” Rossi corrected her, and Morgan blinked. There was a knock at the door and JJ got up to answer it, stepping out into the hall with the officer before she let the door swing gently closed. 

Alright – reframe. “That makes it more plausible; two men can haul a body around pretty easily. What do we know about him?”

“That would be Dr. Altman, also at NYCU, and his is a sadder story.” Garcia had switched windows now. Her screen filled with images of a broad-shouldered man in his early 30s, with short-cropped blond hair and a row of silver hoops up the sides of both ears.  “His father died before he was born, his mother died from breast cancer when he was sixteen, poor guy, and he went to live with an uncle in Portland. Other than what looks like a rough year grade-wise, which is totally understandable, he pulled it up, and ripped through college and grad school on scholarships. No criminal record, good credit rating, he’s even got some of the highest ‘hottie’ scores I’ve ever seen on ‘Rate My Prof.’

“I’m sorry, my loves,” Garcia huffed out a frustrated breath. “But I’m not seeing anything here. These guys are so clean they almost squeak. There is... one thing on Dr. Kaplan’s medical records.” She switched gears, and another file popped up on Morgan’s tablet. “He was hospitalized once for clinical depression when he was in his late teens. He currently has a prescription for 50 mg of trazodone daily, down from 200 mg six years ago.”

“He’s tapering down his antidepressants.” Prentiss scribbled a couple of notes on the paper in front of her.

“Depression has no connection to psychopathy,” Reid interjected. “The two conditions actually demonstrate an inverse relationship, making it extraordinarily unlikely for the same person to exhibit traits of both.”  

“Dr. Altman has one note on his file at NYCU,” Garcia said, still working. “A student accused him of sexual harassment his first year teaching there. But she dropped the charges and he was completely cleared.”

And that was just about enough to be convincing; there had to be a lot more in a profile than adoption and depression, or a parent’s death, to label someone a killer. Hotch didn’t seem to be quite there yet.  

“How about religion? Do either of them have any connections to any local neo-pagan groups?”

“There’s nothing listed for Dr. Altman, though it looks like he went to St. Luke’s up until his mom died, and that is a fancy-schmancy Episcopal school here in New York. Dr. Kaplan is Jewish.” Garcia called up another form on her computer. “He’s nominally a member of the Village Temple in Chelsea, but it doesn’t look like they keep attendance records.”

“So we’ve got a big nothing.” Morgan kicked back in his chair, letting a little of his frustration bleed through. Cases like this one sucked; the more they learned, the less anything seemed to fit. “Four victims now, a broken pattern, and nothing to show for it.” Except for another full drawer in the morgue. Something nagged at him, a thought turning over in the corner of his mind. Leaving the archive building, they’d passed a cluster of officers, forensics, their bags piled on a table at the front entrance. It could have been a reference desk, but what library needed two within ten feet of each other?

“Bring him in anyway.” Hotch met the handful of surprised looks with his usual steady gaze.  “Check his alibi, just to be sure, but he may be able to shed some light on Wilder, and how he ended up dead. Even if Dr. Kaplan’s not our UnSub, there’s something else going on here.”

“Hotch,” Morgan interrupted as he finished giving instructions. “At the archives. We missed something. Campus buildings are normally locked down pretty tight, and there are two desks in the front hall. There’s only one reason for a setup like that.” Hotch was looking at him, and Prentiss’ head jerked up with dawning comprehension. “So what the hell happened to the security guard?”

\--

 **Tommy:** Hey, little bro

 **Tommy:** Where are you?

 **Billy:** Down at the police station. FBI want to ask me about Alex.

 **Tommy:** Darcy told me. What did you do?

 **Billy:** just a witness. I think.

 **Billy:** So how much does a lawyer run these days?

 **Tommy:** $250/hr

 **Billy:** Even for me?

 **Tommy:** For you, $500

 **Billy:** jerk

 **Tommy:** butt

 **Tommy:** I’ll be back in town tomorrow. Don’t do anything dumb.

 **Billy:** Yeah yeah

\--

 **Teddy:** How’re you holding up?

 **Billy:** Meh. Stuck in an interview room waiting

 **Teddy:** Want me to come down?

 **Billy:** I’ll be done by the time you get here. S’ok.

 **Teddy:** Text me when you’re out

 **Billy:** Yeah. See you at home?

 **Teddy:** always

\--

Billy’s thumbs slipped as he fumbled with his phone, his head bent down over the screen. The metal table in the interrogation room – they’d said interview room, but he knew better – was cold on his elbows and forearms, the chill seeping into his bones.

There were footsteps in the hall outside, footsteps and voices. He couldn’t focus enough to make out what they were saying.

His head hurt, Carol’s news echoing in his ears. _They found him this morning._ She had managed to keep her cool, but her eyes were shadowed and dark. They would have told her first, as department chair. Of course. She’d have had time to get her head around the idea. _They wouldn’t say where. But the archive building is all taped off._

Just go by the archive, that’s what he’d said to Alex. Just grab these things for me. If he’d waited, gone himself, what could there possibly have been in those microfilms that couldn’t have waited eight hours until Billy could have gone himself?

Then Alex wouldn’t be–

Then none of this would have-

His face was wet and he scrubbed at it with the back of his hand, his phone dropping to the table with a clatter that echoed painfully in the empty room.

The door opened and he straightened quickly, trying to find that calm face that Teddy put on and off so easily. He couldn’t find it fast enough, and when he met Agent Rossi’s eyes, he knew that everything he was feeling had to be written right there, for everyone to see.

“Thank you for coming down,” was all Rossi said, pulling out the chair on the other side of the table like they were old friends.

“Anything,” Billy replied, and he could hear the tremor, pulled it back until the grief was inside him again instead of spilling out of every pore.

Rossi didn’t stare at him, just placed a file folder on the table and centred it carefully between his hands. “You don’t look so good,” he said, and that had to be one of the most inane things that anyone had said to him so far today.

“Yeah, well. I just found out that one of my students was brutally murdered last night; I figure my audition for America’s Next Top Model is going to have to be deferred.”

Sarcasm probably wasn’t his best choice right now, but fuck it. He was tired, tired down to his soul in a way he hadn’t felt in years. If he’d just gone to the archive to get it his own damn self-

Did Rossi actually smirk at that? There was a curl to his lip just for a moment, then it was gone again, replaced with sympathy that Billy certainly didn’t deserve. “Sorry to hear that,” he replied with an easy deadpan, that shifted into something approaching sincerity. “And I’m sorry to have to do this, but it’s just protocol. You know why you’re here.”

He was going to make Billy say it. He nodded slowly, eyes more on his phone than on Rossi. “Alex Wilder. Carol told me this morning.”

“Carol Danvers?”

“My department chair. The police called her.”

“What was your relationship like with Alex?”

Billy raked his hand back through his hair, pushing it off his forehead and tumbling what little order he had left there. “He’s – he _was_ – my student. He’s just finishing up his coursework; we were working on getting him ready for comps.” But that didn’t answer the question, did it? How did you encapsulate a relationship in a handful of words?

_He was a challenge, he was one of the smartest students I’d ever had, I admired his focus and he wanted my contacts and connections. He liked draft beer after Grad/Fac and a girl who wore corsets, and I never once heard him talk about his parents._

“We were friendly. We met officially every couple of weeks, to talk about his ideas. E-mailed. I saw him at department events. He’s-” _Fuck._ “He _was_ brilliant. His project was shaping up to be really exciting.”

Was it his imagination, or did Rossi soften a little? There was a broad mirror behind him that was obviously two-way. Was there someone back there watching? Rossi was talking; he needed to listen.

“Can you think of anyone who might have had it in for him? Anyone who disliked him?”

“Specifically? No. He could be abrasive sometimes; stand-offish, if he didn’t know you. Especially with the undergrads. But everyone respected him.”

Rossi laid an evidence bag on the table, a slip of torn notebook paper inside. Two call numbers were written there, in Alex's strong, angled hand. “The detectives found this in Alex's pocket. Do the numbers mean anything to you?”

There it was. Billy closed his eyes and steeled himself. “I asked him to go to the archives for me,” he said simply, and waiting for Rossi’s expression to change.

Nothing happened.

“I remembered that there was some old data from the Lindow project that was being stored down there. Stephen – Dr. Strange's – files were being preserved. Some of the older material was already on microfilm. I gave him the call numbers and asked him to go pull them.”

“Why didn’t you go yourself?” The question drove the knife deeper into his gut, and Billy sat taller, tried to fight the waves that were rising up to drown him.

“I had a meeting late last night – the curriculum committee – and the archive would be closed by the time I could get there. Alex is in and out of there all the time, he knew where to find everything, I thought it would make things easier. That maybe something in there would be useful. Instead-“ he trailed off, the mirror mocking him. It was one thing to fall apart in front of Teddy; this might as well have been public.

“What time did your meeting go to?” Back to facts, thank god. These he could remember, didn’t have to justify the unjustifiable.

“... seven to ten. I stayed to talk to Carol about a grant proposal, so I left there maybe ten-thirty. I was home by eleven.”

Rossi made a note in that little notebook he always had on him, and nodded. “I’m sorry to have to do this, but it’s just protocol. You understand. Can you confirm your location on these dates?” He pushed a sheet of paper across the table and Billy stared down at it, the dates and times marching across the page in dispassionate black and white.

“These are the dates of the other murders, aren’t they?”

There was no answer in Rossi’s face, but it wasn’t exactly a spectacular intellectual leap to figure it out. “Like I said; it’s just protocol.”

Dates... times.... Billy pulled out his phone and stared at the calendar in an attempt to quell the rising sense of panic and injustice. “Last night – like I said. A committee meeting. Carol was there; I can give you the names of all the others. The other times...” Oh. Oh thank god. _He_ knew he hadn’t done it, obviously, but the prospect of anyone else believing that he could – that he was guilty of anything other than ignorantly sending a man to his death-

_As if that wasn’t bad enough._

“Dinner with my parents. These two, I was home.”

“Alone?”

“No, with Teddy. Dr. Altman. He can confirm whatever you want to know.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary.” Rossi turned a page, glanced at the tight, dark curls of handwriting that marked the page. “Did Alex mention anything out of the ordinary the last few days? Any new people he’d met, or feelings like he was being watched?”

Had he? Billy had been distracted yesterday, been thinking about Dr. Reid and his mother, about the pictures of bodies left in gardens, old memories of the pub on the corner by the museum, years and years ago in England.

(Nate had hated that trip, even though Billy had called home every night.  He hadn’t told Billy to come home, not outright, but the resentment in his voice had been clear even as he’d been saying all the right things.)

“No,” Billy said finally, breaking the silence that hung heavy in the room. “We spoke about his work, mostly. He was seeing a girl for a while – Nico, something. But I think they broke up a couple of months ago.”

"Do you have a last name? Contact information?"

"I'm afraid not." This was easier, a little, but it felt like betraying a confidence. Could you be betraying someone, if the person whose privacy you were violating was dead? They were going to strip Alex’s life bare, lay him open for the police to examine, the way Billy did on a regular basis with his research subjects; birth and death, marriage and crime. But this was different than trying to piece together lives from bits and pieces of tattered records from a thousand years ago. “It wasn’t a bad breakup, if that’s what you’re thinking. They stayed friends.”

Rossi was harder to read than Billy had originally thought, just a glance toward the mirror betraying something on his mind. “Good to know.”

“Agent Rossi-“ he had to ask, even though it was killing him to form the words. But if he didn’t, he’d live the rest of his life not _knowing_ , and that would be so much worse. “Last night. If I hadn’t sent him.” How could he ask?

How could he not?

“If I hadn’t sent him to the library,” Billy pushed forward. “If I’d gone myself. He’d still be alive, wouldn’t he?”

That gave Rossi pause, and he shook his head slowly. “There’s no way to know that right now,” he said, after a moment that stretched a second too long. “If Alex was a personal target, then the location was only coincidence.”

The evasion was his answer in and of itself, a twist of the knife in his gut.  

_But if it wasn’t personal, then it would have been you instead. And Alex would be sitting at his carrel bitching about comps, not cold and on a slab, his organs being lifted and weighed one by one._

There was more – there had to be to cover, more questions he could help answer, but Rossi was stacking his papers and rising to his feet.

“That’s it?” Billy asked, proud at the way he managed to keep his voice steady.

“For now. Go back to work, get your mind off this as much as you can. If we need anything else, we’ll call.”

Alex’s notes were on his desk, back on campus. His notes, and a book Billy had been meaning to lend him. Someone was going to need to clean out his carrel, his locker, his mailbox.

 _Don’t._ Billy wanted to say. _Don’t send me back alone to sit with his ghost._

He shook his head instead. “I can help,” he insisted, and there was that flicker of something that looked like sympathy in Rossi’s eye. Or was it pity? “I know the background for the case, I knew Alex as well as anyone in the department, I can help you.” _If I fix this – I can’t bring him back, but I can do_ this _._ “I can be more use to you here than there, waiting for a phone call.”

The set of Rossi’s jaw was enough to tell him that he wasn’t making enough of a case for himself; not this time. “Go home, Dr. Kaplan. You don’t need to be exposed to the kind of details we work with here. We’ll call.”

\--

JJ hesitated before knocking briskly on the door to interview room 1. Rossi had been wrapping up when she took the chance to glance in from the observation side, so there wasn’t much point in waiting more than a beat before she opened the door.  

Kaplan was handsome, even if his ears stuck out a little and his glasses sat heavy on his nose. His angular features and slim build were more appealing in person than in the vaguely goofy-looking headshot the university record department had provided. At the moment he was obviously not at his best, his hair tousled from the way he’d been running his fingers through it, and his face ashen.

She had the sudden and unaccountable urge to wrap him up in a fluffy blanket and find him a cup of coffee.

Rossi was sending him home, though, and JJ waited in the hall until he fell into step. “Brian Walters, the afternoon security guard at the archives? He’s vanished,” she reported without preamble, the news that Hotch had sent her down to deliver.  

“Vanished?” Rossi barely broke stride, but even that hesitation was enough of a reaction, coming from him.

She nodded. “Garcia got into the records; they still work on manual timesheets, which is why we didn’t pick it up immediately. His shift should have ended at nine pm, but he never logged out. The precinct sent a couple of uniforms over to his apartment in Jersey, and they just called in – his car’s not there. They’re checking train station parking lots now.”

“Cell phone?”

“Turned off. Garcia’s working on pulling records now.”

“What are the chances that he’s another victim?”

“Or the UnSub,” JJ suggested, and from the look in Rossi’s eyes he’d reached much the same conclusion. “Hotch has ordered an APB, but we’re getting pushback on the roadblocks.”

Rossi rolled his eyes and picked up speed, pushing open the door to the command center. “No kidding. Get Garcia plugged in to the traffic camera feeds instead. It’s going to take more than manpower to catch this guy.”

**Newark, NJ**

 

“If you touch that one more time, I will smack you.”

Reid shifted in the passenger seat, his fingers twitching toward the radio dial again. His leg was stretched out in front of him and he flexed it; his knee had to be bothering him again. “Did you know there was a study done in 2009 that positively correlated Top-40 music with lowered intelligence in listeners?”

The light was still red; Morgan dropped his chin and stared at Reid over the tops of his sunglasses. Reid had his poker face on, which meant– yeah. He was being punked. “I think your intelligence could do with a little lowering, pretty boy,” Morgan replied easily, hitting the gas as the light changed.  

A bright electronic trill signalled his phone ringing, Garcia’s name flashing on the screen. The traffic was moving around them in a rapid flow, too much to risk grabbing for the handsfree. Reid made it before he could pull over, and settled the phone into the cradle. “It’s Reid; Morgan’s driving. You’re on speaker, Garcia.”

“No time for pleasantries, darlings; we’ve got a hit on Walters’ car. A homeowner called it in. Overturned in a ditch in Old Bridge County Park, Marlboro Township. Looks like it’s about thirty-five minutes from your current location.”

“On it, baby girl.” There was an exit coming up and Morgan changed lanes quickly; too quickly, judging by the way Reid flailed and grabbed on to the oh-shit handle as if his life depended on it. “Tell Hotch we’re on our way. What’s my fastest route?”

“Take Texas Road, off Highway 9, my delicious road warrior. Local PD are already on their way. P.G. out.”

\--

The scene was being processed by the time Morgan pulled in beside a black-and-white. A half-dozen CSIs were spread out along the side of the road, a beat-up old white sedan upside down in the ditch. A single body was laid out on the verge already swathed in black, the coroner’s assistants sliding the zipper of the body bag closed.

Jersey police this time; they’d supposedly been briefed, but Morgan flashed his badge anyway. “FBI; Agent Morgan. This is Dr. Reid. Is this our guy?”

The uniform flipped open a wallet, the leather sticking slightly to his gloved hands. “You’re looking for Brian Walters, Jersey license?”

Morgan took off his sunglasses, let the cop see his eyes as he quickly skimmed the card. The photo matched the one Garcia had pulled: late twenties, white, hair some indeterminate blond color, and a scar on his eyebrow that had probably been a piercing, once. “That’s him. What happened?”

Reid had caught up and he peered over Morgan’s shoulder before the wallet went back into the evidence bag. “There are skid marks on the road,” he pointed back the way they’d come, a handful of orange cones blocking out the trail. “Hit and run? And did you find any microfilms in his possessions?”

“Nothing like that yet, and there’s no evidence of a collision,” the officer shook his head and stripped off the gloves as he spoke. “Best we can figure, he was driving too fast, lost control, didn’t take the curve cleanly and rolled.” He gestured down into the ditch, shattered glass sparkling in the grass as the mid-afternoon sun caught it. “I figure it’s a single vehicle accident; we see it often enough. Time of death was somewhere around midnight, maybe 12:30 in the morning. We’ll know more once the ME gets a chance to do a tox screen, see how much he’d been drinking. Now if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I have work to do.”

Morgan waved him off, and Reid’s sceptical expression matched his own feelings too well. “Wilder gets killed at the archive, and our only current suspect is dead in a car crash not two hours later? That’s not coincidence.”

“Definitely not,” Reid agreed, and he shielded his eyes from the sun with his hand as he watched the forensics team work. “We need to make sure the coroner checks for defensive wounds, blood spatter, maybe DNA under his fingernails. Whether he interacted with the UnSub and was trying to escape-“

“Or he killed Wilder and was trying to run,” Morgan finished the thought, “there might be something left on him. I’ll call Hotch. You talk to the ME. We need him processed as fast as possible.” Reid headed off and Morgan caught himself rubbing the back of his neck with his hand as he tried to sort through all the new possibilities this opened up.

“What the hell,” he asked rhetorically, no-one within earshot to answer, “is going on here?”

 

**Greenwich Village, NYC:**

 

“You’re going to make yourself crazy,” Teddy tapped his fingers on the top of Billy’s laptop screen, in an attempt to catch his attention. He’d been a distracted mess after leaving the police station, barely managed to stumble his way through his afternoon classes (thankfully everyone made the right sort of noises; half the department was in a state of shock). The walk home had helped to clear his head, but not enough. Nowhere near enough.

Home wasn’t much better. It was familiar and felt safe in a way the campus didn’t anymore, but it left Billy with too much space and quiet. Too much opportunity to think. Working was better. At the moment he had about fifteen windows open, tabbing fluidly between them. “I need to do this, T. I’m chasing a needle in a haystack, but if I can just find the right magnet-“

“Fine,” Teddy sat down beside him on the couch, and grabbed Billy’s hands off his keyboard. His palms were broader than Billy’s, covered him and warmed him through. “Then you’re going to drive _me_ crazy. What are you hoping to find?”

Billy tipped his head and caught Teddy’s gaze, his eyes dark with concern and love and a hundred other things all tangled together. “Somewhere in here, I have something that will be important. There’s no way it’s not connected. If I can recreate what was on the microfilms– I put in a request at the archives for all of Stephen’s old notes, but the police have everything locked down.” Billy was rambling, justifying, and he could feel the frustration in his voice, anger he didn’t mean to direct at Teddy, but it had nowhere _else_ to go.

 “Hey,” Teddy said again, a warning in his tone this time, and he crooked a finger under Billy’s chin to make him turn and meet his eyes. “You can just give them the basic data, you know. That’s what the police have analysts for. This isn’t something you need to kill yourself over.”

He couldn’t be angry with Teddy; none of this was his fault.

That word; that word broke the dam and the next breath that Billy took shuddered in his lungs and if he didn’t say something he’d explode, and– well. Teddy had forgiven him for a lot of things before.

“It’s my fault,” the words were poison on his lips, foul-tasting and slick. Was he going to throw up? No; but it might be a close thing. “It’s _my_ fault that Alex was there.” Rossi hadn’t denied that. “If I hadn’t asked him to go to the archives, he’d be alive right now.”

“No, Billy-“ Teddy took his computer off his lap and moved it away, then grabbed Billy’s hands to pull him in close. He was warm and solid and real, and he stroked his hands up and down Billy’s arms until he stopped trembling. “Don’t do this. You can’t know that.” Teddy voice was a murmur in his ear, low and real and firm. “There’s no _way_ you could know that. Alex lived there half the time; he could have been there anyway. Or the killer might have been following him.”

“I knew there was someone killing people on campuses, I sent him; he died alone in the dark because I had a _meeting_.”

“C’mere.” Teddy rested his forehead against Billy’s, pressed his hands close around his upper arms, breathed with him until the panic and gorge rising in Billy’s throat started to settle. “Don’t do this to yourself, B,” he whispered after a minute. “I liked Alex; we all did. This is an unbelievable, horrible, awful thing, and the whole department will be grieving for a long time. But it. is. not. your. fault. And driving yourself insane trying to find the answers that may not even be in those files isn’t going to help anyone. Especially not Alex.”

Except that it might be, and every minute that he wasn’t looking, was another minute closer to someone else’s death-

“I can hear you overthinking, you know,” Teddy sighed, and he tightened his arms around Billy possessively. Protectively. “Come on. Bed.”

“It’s still early,” Billy muttered, rubbing at his eyes behind his glasses. “I don’t think I can sleep.”

“I didn’t say sleep,” Teddy replied, but his voice was kind more than anything else. “You’re a giant ball of stress. I’ll rub your back. You’ll talk to me. You’ll get away from that damned computer screen for a little while and then see how you feel.”

That sounded... okay. Kind of good.

He didn’t deserve ‘good.’

Teddy pulled him off the couch, despite his resistance, and pushed him toward their bedroom door.

It felt better than good, despite the circles of thought running furiously through his brain. Teddy’s hands were slick with the massage oil that Kate had regifted to them last Valentine’s. (“Kama Sutra kit, seriously?” “Just don’t ask where I got it. Or ever give me details.”) He smoothed the tension away until Billy’s face was damp, but whether the tears were for Alex, or from the unknotting of all his stress and grief and guilt, or the way Teddy instinctively found each tiny ache and beat it into submission – he’d never know, and he was happier for it.

He was the one to initiate the kiss, searching for the reassurance, rings gleaming golden on their hands and heartbeats rocketing faster and faster within their naked chests. “I’m a horrible person,” he’d whispered, slipping a hand in between their bodies to pull Teddy free from his boxers. But he needed this, needed touch and wet and Teddy’s heat sinking into the chill in his bones, warming him from the inside out.

“You’re not,” Teddy murmured. “We’re alive, we’re together, there’s nothing wrong with needing proof.”

So when Teddy opened him up with slick, gentle fingers, and pressed inside, Billy let his knees fall apart to take him. And when Teddy’s face was wet with his own tears, Billy propped himself up on his elbows, slid his mouth across Teddy’s cheeks and kissed the salt away. He was full, so full, and every slow roll of their hips broke him open. He stroked his cock, matching Teddy’s rhythm. The heels of Teddy’s hands pressed against Billy’s hips, his fingers digging into his skin. Teddy’s mouth was hot on the hollow of his throat, teeth grazing his skin, then lips, then the hot, wet slide of his tongue.

And like this, under Teddy and around him, his world condensed to the push-slide of being fucked, his own tight grip around his cock, the sting and relief of Teddy’s insistent mouth–

He could almost forget.

Billy spilled over their clasped hands with Teddy’s name on his lips, a raw sound caught somewhere between a gasp and a moan.

A phone rang, somewhere in the distance, but it hardly mattered.

Teddy drove into him again, faster than before, his breath hot on Billy’s skin, coming in rapid pants. Teddy’s forearms braced on either side, Billy rolled his hips back up, drove himself onto Teddy’s cock despite the ache, the temptation to flinch away from the overstimulation.

It was only a moment before Teddy shuddered, his body freezing above Billy, his arms locked tight. The pillow under Billy’s head was cool and wet, he had the corner in his mouth and couldn’t remember how it had gotten there. His fingers hurt from clenching them into the bedsheets, and his hips throbbed from the stretch.

Teddy curled tight around him again after they came back to bed, clean and tasting of mint. He pulled Billy in to his chest and rested his chin on the top of Billy’s head, their limbs entangled.

They didn’t speak, their breathing settling into even and synchronized rises and falls. He fell asleep more easily than he meant to, weariness settling over him.

\--

He woke up at the witching hour. Alex was a dim vision in the black of night, his throat gaping wide and raw in a grotesque parody of a smile, muscle, fat and tendon glistening wet and red and white– his shirtfront wet and gleaming with the blood that pulsed from that obscenity of a wound.

Billy shoved himself back and away, his breath caught, his limbs leaden. There was nowhere to go. The thing that wore Alex’s face advanced, opened its mouth. Its lips moved but no sound came out. _Your fault_ , it mouthed, _you did this_.

Billy woke up screaming.

Arms came around him and the clock was blinking in the blackness. Teddy was there, holding him, wiping the sweat from his forehead and kissing his hair until his heart stopped trying to break out of his chest.

The bedroom was empty. There was no blood, no face, no ghost.

He lay back down, curled Teddy’s arms around him again, but he didn’t sleep. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There _was_ a study done in 2009 that purported to correlate intelligence with musical tastes, but it was a pop-science survey that was published with no real analysis. Morgan is definitely getting punked.
> 
> http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-03/does-your-taste-music-reflect-your-intelligence


	4. Thursday, pt. 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Morgan's having a bad day, Garcia and Darcy make a terrifying team, Billy tries to help, and things go a little bit pear-shaped.

**Sixth Precinct, NYPD, NYC:**

 

The coffee maker on the counter in the command center wheezed and sputtered as it eked out the last few drips into the carafe, and Morgan grabbed for the handle before Prentiss could beat him to it.

“Good morning to you, too.” She waited for him to finish pouring before reaching for the pot, and she looked about as bagged as he felt.

“Sorry.” The last night working over the piles of evidence, the journals and papers pulled from the victims’ apartments, the endless material that Garcia kept digging out of their hard drives, all in an attempt to find some connection– it was taking its toll on everyone. “Running low here; four hours of sleep just isn’t cutting it.” He filled a second mug for her from the handful that JJ had scrounged from somewhere, and passed it over. “Have you seen Hotch?”

“He came in early,” Prentiss wrapped her hands around the cup and brought it to her lips. “He was already gone by the time I left the motel.”

The door swung open with a sharp bang, and whatever retort Morgan was about to make died on his lips. Hotch was all business, like always these days, and the more flustered he got inside, the more careful and precise he was on the outside. “We need to deliver the profile,” Hotch announced without preamble. “We should have had one together yesterday. Where are we?”

“We’re spinning our wheels.” That was Rossi’s contribution, sage-like and pensive in one of the chairs around the table. Prentiss dropped into the chair next to him, and Morgan joined them.

“Three victims killed to look like ritual sacrifices,” Morgan began, when Hotch’s eye fell on him. “All of them with religious books or material on paganism at home. The fourth murder was committed in a panic and made to look like the first three, and now the only potential witness run off the road. Obviously connected, but it’s a totally different MO.”

Rossi picked up the thread when Morgan paused. “The first three kills were intensely personal, the fourth one angry, and the last one completely _im_ personal. You can’t get much more removed from your victim than from behind the wheel. That’s a backward regression for your garden-variety sadist. There’s no thrill.”

“We’ve already profiled that this is two killers,” Prentiss added. “Maybe the security guard was clean-up, not Wilder?”

Rossi frowned, his brow creasing with it. “So the security guard kills Wilder, and then gets killed himself? What does that tell us?”

“It tells us that we’ve been going about this all wrong.” JJ entered, Reid trailing behind her. He flopped down into the nearest chair and she kept talking. “Forensics just came back on Wilder; they found a fingerprint on his belt buckle that they were able to match to Walters.”

Prentiss sat up straight in her chair. “So Walters was one of our UnSubs after all?”

“Not so fast,” Reid cautioned. “They went back and checked against some DNA they recovered from previous bodies. They hadn’t found a match before.”

“But now they have,” Morgan prompted, and could he not just get to the point?

“Epithelials that they’ve now identified as being from Naomi Li were found on both Wyland and Brock, and a hair caught in the rope impression around her neck was a match for Walters.”

“Wait-“ Prentiss tapped her pen rapidly on the table. “Our third victim helped kill the first two? And our _fifth_ not only killed number four, but was involved in the death of Li?” She looked at Hotch with wide and understanding eyes. “Hotch, this isn’t a _pair_ of UnSubs-”

“-It’s an entire group.” Hotch had his tablet out and he deleted a page of tiny print that Morgan recognized as their draft from the night before. “Whoever killed Walters was cleaning up a mistake. We need to rewrite this from the ground up.

“JJ.” Hotch glanced up at her, and she paused in her note-taking. “Talk to the captain. I need representatives from the 6th, 10th and 13th precincts, at least one representative from the college administration, and NYCU’s security director. Have them here for noon so we can deliver the profile.”

\--

The bullpen at the precinct was packed by the time the BAU team assembled with profile in hand. Hotch took the lead. The room didn’t fall completely silent – with that many people, there was no way – but the hush was restless and expectant, feet shuffling and murmurs raising the baseline noise in the space.

Hotch waited. The sound died down.

“Thank you all for coming,” he began, the platitudes the same as always. His eyes fell on the handful of men and women in suits, a couple in blue security uniforms marked with the NYCU logo. “I assume you’ve been briefed on why you’re here. We need your eyes, your memories and your knowledge of the city, to prevent any more deaths. This group will have made a mark on your campus. You have seen or heard things and not made the connection at the time; but the information you have could make all the difference. Please listen carefully to the following profile; we’ll take questions after.”

“We’re looking for a group,” Rossi began, “but there will be one leader. He’s a megalomaniac; he gets off on control. By convincing or forcing his followers to do things they normally wouldn’t consider, he’s proving his own power. He doesn’t sexually assault his victims, because that’s not where he gets his thrill. He may even be impotent. For this guy, it’s all about the psychological domination.”

Prentiss continued, her arms folded and her posture radiating calm intensity. “The leader is male. Given the victims’ ages, and his ability to win their trust, he’s most likely between 30 and 60. He’s fixated on Druids, a religious group native to the Iron Age British isles, which means he’s very likely white, possibly originally from the UK. He’ll be charming, extremely charismatic and socially adept, but a bully when he’s crossed, or toward someone he perceives as being an easy target. His neighbors and associates will admire him, but go out of their way not to make him angry.”

“He has an academic background,” Reid added, catching Prentiss’ glance. “He knows European history, and has access to secure places on campus. He’s most likely an integrated member of the college community. He could be a part-time instructor, a library staff member, a grad student. He knows how to fit in. Check the security logs for guests who signed in on the days surrounding the murders, without scheduled appointments. He may be using credentials from other institutions in the city.”

It was Morgan’s turn and he looked out over the sea of faces. “Three, possibly four of his followers are dead; it’s likely that he still has more. They cross age, gender and racial lines. What they do share is a lack of connection to community. The first three were new in town or had no roots otherwise; they were looking for guidance. He’s using that to win their loyalty, by giving them something to believe in. They believe in this man deeply enough that they’re willing to kill for him; we have to assume that they’ll be willing to die for him as well. We can’t afford a violent confrontation.”

The muttering grew, and one of the officers – 10th precinct, white hair – flicked two fingers upward to catch Morgan’s attention. “You’re talking about a cult. Is this guy some kind of priest?”

“Of sorts,” Morgan answered. “But probably not ordained officially. He’s presenting himself as an authority figure to fill a void in his own life.”

Hotch took it from there. “He may even believe that he's divinely inspired, and that his instructions are messages from a higher power. His followers certainly do. That will make them very dangerous to anyone who gets in the way of their mission. He recently had some kind of personal loss, a situation where he felt powerless, and manipulating this group became a way to relieve those feelings of inadequacy.”

“He has access to property in the downtown area where he can hold meetings and engage in their rituals uninterrupted,” Reid continued. “Look for a brownstone that changed hands recently, with a high fence. Also look for empty or condemned buildings, and delayed construction sites. One of the members of the group, if not him, has, or has access to, a van or a pickup truck. That’s how they’re moving the bodies.”

A handful of basic questions, the same ones they always got (how can you be sure it’s a male? Are profiles like this accurate? Do you know how many buildings there are in New York?) – and then the room was clearing, slowly, and the precinct returned to semi-normal. Hotch turned as the last of the group filed out, and they gathered in; not quite ducklings, but always following his lead.

“Morgan, Prentiss,” Hotch singled them out first, and Reid lifted his chin. “Go back to NYCU. Talk to Dr. Kaplan and see what you can find out about the microfilms. Dave, get in touch with the British Museum, see what you can get out of them about the Lindow Man project. Find those other students. JJ, coordinate communications with the NYCU HR department; get access to all their employee records. Garcia, run them all for red flags, filtering for truck ownership, downtown property, criminal records of any kind, then we’ll need to go over the remaining files by hand.”

“Sir,” Garcia interrupted, and she looked at Morgan as though to ask for backup. “That is an unbelievable amount of material. There are over eight thousand employees at that university, and that’s not even including grad students and casual workers. I can get you the electronic filters in a heartbeat, but for the reading – we’re going to need more help.”

“Talk to HR,” Hotch replied, and thank goodness he was taking her seriously. Not even Reid would be able to sort through that much, that quickly. “They can recommend someone.”

 

**History Department Offices, NYCU:**

 

“Yeah, they generally don’t like this stuff being taken off-campus,” Darcy explained as she led Dr. Reid and his companion through the hallway and up to the conference room that sat right above her main floor office. The woman replacing Goatee Mafia Guy was cute as hell and made killer wardrobe choices, but despite the credentials they’d both flashed, she looked even less like an FBI agent than Reid. “I had HR send all the files you wanted over here, so that Ms. Hill wouldn’t actually burst a blood vessel.”

“Is that a thing that happens?” Penelope asked, with a grin, and Darcy nodded solemnly.

“She gets this vein, right above her eye, and the madder she gets, the faster it pulses. It’s kind of hypnotic.”

She opened the door and ushered them inside, making a face at the boxes of files that a grumbling guy from trucking had dropped off in the office an hour ago. “They keep saying they’re going to digitize all this crap, but they have a hard enough time keeping up with the incoming students, never mind getting some poor dopes to scan it all in as well.”

Dr. Reid sat down at one end of the table with what kind of sounded like a sigh of relief, and Darcy flopped dramatically into a chair of her own. Penelope was setting up a sweet-looking pair of laptops that probably cost a couple of months’ worth of Darcy’s salary each, and Darcy pulled out her phone. “Hang on a sec. Let me get you a password for the campus network.”

Penelope flashed a wicked grin and shook her head, perfectly shaped red curls bouncing against her neck. “No need, my friend; I’m already in.” Her screens filled with data even as Darcy watched, the college’s main page, the HR page, the search screens–

Darcy looked her over, from the top of her electric-blue floral hairclip to her great rack and the soles of her unbelievably cute shoes, and Darcy _knew_. “I need to be you when I grow up,” she breathed out in something a lot like admiration.

Reid paused as he was reaching out for the first of the boxes, and glanced from one to the other. “I don’t think the world could handle more than one.”

“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” Penelope preened, then cracked her knuckles. “Let’s do this thing.”   

Darcy kicked off from the wall and scooted her chair around the end of the table, so she could get a better look. Penelope had some kind of search going already, spitting out names into another window as it went. “So I’ve already eliminated a bunch of people who don’t fit the core profile for our cult leader,” she explained, and Darcy nodded.

“That’s where all these files came from.”

“Right. And what I’m running here is filtering criteria to try and isolate people on campus who fit the profile for his followers.”

Like that was even really possible? “That’s not something you can know from college transcripts,” Darcy objected.

“No, but they help,” Reid looked up from the file he was skimming – no, from the third file, because he’d set two aside in a pile while she’d been looking over Garcia’s shoulder. “Profiling isn’t an exact science, but there are patterns in everything, if you know what you’re looking for.”

“Right.” She didn’t entirely buy it, because there was this thing called human agency and free will, and she’d be damned if she fit into some little box that some guy tagged ‘secretary’ and attached personality traits to. It was about as legit as the zodiac, when you came down to it. ‘College secretary. Likes cats and beaded chains for glasses. Most likely to go insane and kill someone in late August and early May.’

Actually, that didn’t sound too far off. Except for the glasses chain.

And the cats.

“So what am I here for?”

“Background information,” Reid answered. “The files are one thing, but you know these people.”

“Some of them,” Darcy objected, swiping a folder off the stop of the stack from the first box. “Not everybody.”

“It has to be someone who knows the campus,” Reid kept going, and he gave her an apologetic kind of smile when he caught her eye. “Who can get around and get to know people without looking out of place.”

“So like you, you mean?” Darcy smarted off, and Garcia laughed.

“Yeah, actually,” Reid agreed, nodding enthusiastically, and some of the tension in the room faded.  “So it won’t be an awkward freshman, or a new hire.”

“Or half the Math faculty. At least my babies generally have social skills.” And that started her thinking about the gorgeous idiots in her department – Luke with his wallet jammed full of pictures of his daughter, Steve and his growing accidental collection of American flag paraphernalia, Carol and Jess and the elaborate set of hand signals they’d come up with to gossip during department meetings.

And meetings made her think of Grad/Fac, and that reminded her of the grad students, and then she was thinking about Alex and she’d been quiet for too long, because the FBI agents were both looking at her with what was probably concern, but could also mean something like ‘how did we end up with the crazy one’?

“Did you know him well?” Penelope asked, and she had to be some kind of a mind-reader, but Darcy nodded anyway. Then shook her head.

“Yes, no, maybe? I mean, I knew him, I sorted his mail, like everyone else’s. But he didn’t really hang out in the department office. He had his own thing going on.”

Reid looked up, and blinked. “Was he religious at all?”

“Alex?” Darcy asked, to give herself time to think, more than because she was actually confused. “No. He’d argue with anyone about the history of anything, but I don’t ever remember him talking about God otherwise.” And given her usual penchant for boys who argued just for the sake of it, they really should have been better friends. Life was funny sometimes.

She started actually reading the file in her hands, just to have something to do rather than talk about a kid she’d never be able to bitch about to Pepper again. “Right. So stuff about these people that doesn’t show up in the paperwork.”

_Peter Parker, Chemistry_. “Like what? I know Peter; he works with Tony’s friend Bruce.”

“Who’s Tony?” Reid cocked his head.

“Pepper’s boyfriend. He drinks all our coffee.”

Reid had a look on his face like he knew he was going to regret asking, but he did it anyway. “Who’s Pepper?”

“The office manager; my boss. She’s dating Tony, and he’s Engineering faculty. He hangs out and blows stuff up with Bruce, and Peter is his grad student. Bruce’s, not Tony’s. He’s an orphan, true,” that had been highlighted already, under ‘next of kin,’ poor guy, “but he’s got this super-hottie girlfriend. No way a dweeb like Peter – don’t get me wrong, he’s super-nice, but he’s no Calvin model, you know? No way is he jeopardizing tapping _that_ to fall in with some weird guys in bedsheets.”

She slapped the folder closed, and took a breath. Reid had developed a vaguely hunted expression, but Penelope was grinning. Cool.  “That was easy. Next!” 

“I like her,” Penelope announced. “Do you think Hotch will believe it if I say she followed me home?”

Reid paused in his insanely fast skimming of the file in front of him and glanced up. “I’m pretty sure there’s a department policy against taking in strays.”

Darcy laughed. “Oooh, good burn.”

Reid had a pretty nice smile.

They fell into an easy rhythm after that, and while there were a few that Darcy couldn’t place even with pictures, she could generally dredge at least something up from the depths of her memory.

“No. He’s like, the _king_ of bad decision making. I wouldn’t bring his name up anywhere near Drs. Drew or Danvers. Or Ms. Morse, in legal. Or Kate Bishop, half the time. Or Dr. Altman... not like that! There was a thing with his chairs and a desk, at one point. But he’s a good guy at heart.”

Or, “totally suspicious. No-one who eats pineapple on pizza can be trusted.”

Or, “yeah. You know what? Yeah. She was off for, like, a week last fall when her mom died, they were super-close. She’s always got a self-help book of some kind in her purse now, and she’s gotten squirrely.”  

So by the time there were more voices in the hall – two of them ‘hers,’ one unfamiliar – they’d got a half-decent pile of ‘no’ and a much smaller available stack of ‘maybe.’

And something like another five hundred files to go through, but at least the company was good.

“So is this the point where you tell me all about your heroic escapades? Maybe offer to show me a scar or two?” The voice filtered in through the opening door, the speaker momentarily blocked. That was Kate all over, the amusement thick in her tone.

There had been a time when Darcy had been horribly intimidated by Kate Bishop. It wasn’t that her family was filthy rich, necessarily, or the doctorate while Darcy was still trying to find something useful to do with her Masters, or even the stupidly effortless way she managed to look amazing no matter what. But that had been before getting to know her; before watching her burn through a thrift store and find the hidden Versace in under five minutes; before seeing her bully half the department into awed submission at meetings; after banishing the ugly thought that _Tom wanted_ her _, but he got stuck with_ me _._

Because Darcy’d wanted Karl Urban and had gotten stuck with Tommy, so they were probably about even.

“Only if you want me to. I’ve got nothing to prove.” The male voice flirting back was deep and laced with humour, and was the kind of warm baritone that could do horrible things to a whole lot of people’s panties. The body that followed it wasn’t any less distracting, all muscles and dark skin poured into a V-neck and a pair of black jeans that wouldn’t have looked quite so sinful on anyone else. Bill brought up the rear behind Hot Guy and Kate, and the look of mild exasperation on his face suggested this had been going on for longer than just that exchange.

“Hey there, tall, dark and beautiful,” Penelope greeted them – Darcy assumed she meant Hot Guy, because _really_ – and then nodded at the two professors. “What’cha bring me?”

“Hostages,” Bill replied, but he didn’t seem too put out. Just... sad. And tired. And Alex’s parents would be flying in at some point in the next couple of days, wouldn’t they? God, that was going to suck; for him as well as for them.

“Some more pairs of eyes, sweet thing,” Hot Guy answered, then seemed to notice for the first time that Darcy was in the room. “Darcy Lewis, right?”

“That’s me,” Darcy replied. “You’re with them?”

“Derek Morgan, with the Behavioural Analysis Unit,” Hot Guy named himself.

“Aw. Now the mystery is all gone,” Darcy couldn’t help herself. Hey, if Penelope could do it...

“He’s a man of mystery,” Kate smirked, but her eyes lingered a little too long on his shoulders and arms for there to be any real spite in her words. “Just ask him.”

Reid seemed to have developed a twitch beside his eye.

“Hey now,” Morgan warned, but he was chuckling, so she didn’t feel bad at all. “What did I do to deserve this?”

“Nothing yet, honey-bunches,” Penelope replied, “but I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

Morgan shook his head, chuckling. “And on that note, I have to go call Rossi. Behave yourse-“ he pointed at Penelope, then glanced at Darcy, and then at Kate, and stopped halfway through the word. “Never mind.”

He turned to Billy and Reid instead, at the far end of the table. “Good luck,” he said instead, shaking his head. “Got anything for me before I roll?”

“Here.” Reid handed him their ‘maybe’ pile. “These are possibles so far; get them to JJ and Hotch?”

“Yeah, thanks.” He tucked them in his arm, flashed a brilliant grin at Kate, Penelope and Darcy, and headed out. Darcy didn’t even think to ask for them back before he was gone. Whatever; Hill could suck it.

“Are those handcuffs on his belt?” Bill asked, and she knew without turning that he was looking at the same thing she was.

“Unh-hunh.”

There was a moment of silence in honor of That Ass, then Darcy spoke with faint reverence. “If you aren’t hitting that at least three times a week, then I’m afraid I’m going to have to stop talking to you.”

Reid had definitely developed a twitch.

 “Oh, honey,’ Penelope replied, shaking her head. “The inferno of hotness that is Derek Morgan is the love of my life, yes. But if we were ever to get together, the combined fabulousness would be so impressive that the earth itself might explode under the strain.”

That was probably true. “The good of the many outweighs the allure of that magnificent booty?”

“Something like that.”

\--

Darcy had been installed in the conference room before he and Kate got there, but while Billy was glad to see her – they’d gotten closer, to a certain extent, over the couple of years that she’d been dating his brother – he really wasn’t in the mood for her patented brand of irreverence right now. Especially when it seemed like she’d found a platonic soulmate. He gravitated toward Reid instead, surrounded by file folders piled around him like barricades, and drew up a chair at the far end of the table.

Even after six years on campus, it turned out, he knew maybe half the number of people that Darcy did. It still didn’t feel like he was doing enough, but at least he wasn’t sitting in his office staring out the window and trying to make himself believe that nothing bad had happened.

Beside him, Reid passed him another folder. Billy still hadn’t cracked the last two.

“How fast _can_ you read?” he asked without thinking, and Reid’s finger paused three-quarters down the first page of the next file. He probably got that question all the time.

He didn’t seem perturbed, though, just gave a half-hearted little shrug. “20,000 words per minute.”

Whether he really didn’t care or was just used to people being nosy, the easy casualness of his reply kept it tension-free, which was good. Billy was already strung tight. “Wow,” he replied instead, trying to parse that staggering number. “That… would have been really useful during my PhD.”

“It was,” Reid agreed, and there was a certain blasé satisfaction in his eyes at the answer. “Three times.”

And there was nothing quite like an answer like that to make a guy feel small. Well, not _small_ , but somehow uneducated. And Reid had to be younger than he was; how did that even work? When had he found the time? “ _Three?_ ”

And _dammit_. He’d managed not to offend Reid with the first nosy question, and now he was making a butt of himself despite the reprieve. Thank god for his friend Garcia, though, because the hum of her conversation with Kate and Darcy faded and she looked up from her humming and buzzing computer screens with a frown on her face.

“You have something, Garcia?” Reid asked, brushing his bangs out of the way with the back of his hand.

“I’ve had a background script running comparative scans on the victims’ hard drives while we go,” she explained, “looking for common text strings. All but Wilder’s; but his isn’t finished processing yet. I just got my fourth ping on a name – ‘Brother John.’ Who is that?”

“Brother John?” Kate echoed, and Billy shrugged when she caught his eye. “I have no idea,” Kate finished. “Maybe someone connected to the multifaith center? Or one of the campus religious groups? I know there are a couple of Christian congregations; the Pentecostal kids keep leaving pamphlets on desks during my Religion and Reformation class.”  

“It seems unlikely,” Reid leaned back in his chair and stared into the middle-distance. “We’ve been through the apartments of all the victims. And except for Alex Wilder – which we’ve agreed was the exception to the Unsub’s pattern.”

Which was worse, the casual acknowledgement of Alex’s death as something that the killer didn’t have planned, or the way Reid kept talking like it meant nothing? As though because he didn’t fit their special pattern, the fact that he was dead didn’t really matter? It might not be the big clue that they wanted, the thing that would lead the FBI to the killers, but it was all Billy could do not to jump up and yell, to wave his arms and shout ‘he _mattered,_ for fuck’s sake!’

Except there was no way that would end except with him getting politely shown the door, and at least in here he could help.

Reid was still talking, and Billy tuned back in. “All the victims’ residences showed evidence of a certain searching for spiritual fulfillment – self-help books, religious tracts, an altar. All of them had some interest in paganism, not Christianity.”

“There are pagan groups as well.” Billy glanced at Garcia’s laptop – would she? – then pulled out his phone to poke at a search engine instead of bothering to ask. “There was a fuss last year when one of their club meetings ran over the Muslim prayer group’s booking time in the multifaith center. It made the student-run news website. People wrote hate mail. Mostly aimed at the other people writing hate mail, or pre-rebuttals of the hate mail they assumed would get sent, but never did. Standard stuff.”

“Garcia, run social media accounts for the victims; include calendar entries and any personal blogs you can find,” Reid asked, and he grabbed for the notebook buried under his stack of files. He fumbled around for a pen, and Billy sat one in his hand. “Isolate any references to Brother John, services, ‘sessions’ or ‘circles.’”

“On it, boy wonder,” Garcia replied and dove back into her world of flickering lights and screens. Within moments, images and brightly-colored backgrounds went whizzing by, a datastream almost too fast for his eyes to parse. Darcy was the one who yelped, though, and pointed at the screen.

“There. Go back, like, sixteen frames. I have no idea how you read that quickly.”

The photograph reframed and expanded across one of Garcia’s screens, the grinning picture of Naomi Li in the lobby of the library a gut-wrenching reminder of what she had looked like alive. Not grey and cold with clots of blood matted thick in her long dark hair.

“There,” Darcy was pointing, and Garcia did something to resolve the image, zoom in on the bulletin board in the background.

Kate nodded slowly. “I remember those posters. They went up all over campus in September.”

The poster in the background was plain in design, a swirling black and white line-art image of a tree dominating the white field. The text was blurred out thanks to the resolution of the image, but with a squint– "Spiritual circle, with Brother John, Thursdays-" Billy read over Garcia's shoulder. "But the address and phone number are way too small. Can you make it clearer?"

Garcia sighed at him. "This isn't CSI, just so you know. The pixels I have are the pixels you get." She tapped away for a second, regardless. But what I can do, is isolate the poster and run it against an image recognition search to see if anyone's uploaded another picture somewhere, and..."

She hit a button with a flourish, and a sheet spooled out from the printer with a clean copy of the poster. "Et voila. My job gets so much easier when people keep uploading all their junk to Facebook."

Reid was already thumbing a button on his phone as another couple of windows popped up on Garcia's screens. "Number is local, obvs, but it's a burn cell and hasn't been activated since January. I'm guessing he's moved on to a new one. Oops, but lookie here... You can't hide from me that easily," she muttered, and in a second she had a Facebook page with no photo, an email address, and by the time Reid was speaking to whoever had answered his call, she had an isp report and a name.

Oh. Oh _God_. That couldn't be right, this couldn't be because of him after all. But it was there, undeniable, blinking on the screen in violent green letters.  The bile rose in his chest, hot and foul. He needed air; he needed space, and for this not to be real, and if he didn't get out of the room and away from that blinking, accusatory name, he was going to throw up. 

"So," Garcia glanced up at Billy, then over at Darcy and Kate. "What do we know about a guy named John Kessler?" 

 

**6th Precinct, NYC:**

                                     

“John Kessler,” Hotch entered the command center at the precinct like he was on fire. “How did we miss him?”

JJ spun to hand him the tablet, Garcia’s newest communiqués on the screen. “He was supposedly in Ireland. The basic background check showed that he still has an apartment in Dublin, and his bank accounts are all still in Ireland.

“He’s 36,” she began to brief him when he didn’t jump in to the conversation immediately. “He did his PhD at Boston University at the same time as Dr. Kaplan. They shared a supervisor – Kessler’s thesis was on early religion in Ireland – druids and monks. He had a research position after that, in Galway, then a teaching position at the University of Dublin. His contract was terminated last year after some altercations with students; nothing violent, but he got written up for inappropriate classroom behavior. From what Garcia can tell, he flew to the States in August under an assumed name, and he’s been living in New York ever since.”

The room was empty but for the two of them; she caught Hotch’s glance around at the chairs before he had the chance to ask. “Morgan and Reid are still at NYCU with Garcia; Rossi and Prentiss are tracking down the last of Reid’s possible cult members. There are two left we couldn’t confirm.”

“Kessler?”

“Garcia tracked down a possible address for him; some uniforms are heading out there now.”

“He won’t be there. He’s been more than one step ahead of us this entire time.” And that look meant conference time. She had her phone in her hand and was dialing-

“Get the team on the line,” Hotch ordered, swiping across the screen and not looking up.

“Already on it.”

The line connected with a beep, and JJ relaxed incrementally at Garcia’s voice. “Oracle of Delphi, at your service.”

“You’re on speaker, Garcia, for Hotch and I,” JJ led with, then, “are Reid and Morgan there?”

“They are indeed, my darling queen.”

 “Garcia,” Hotch interrupted curtly.

“Yes, sir.” The transformation was as quick as ever; Garcia flipped from flirt to functionary between one breath and the next.

“You have an address for Kessler; do you have phone records?”

“Our friend John was a big fan of burn phones, sir,” JJ heard the sounds of typing mingled with murmuring voices in the background. “Based on patterns of phone calls to the victims – all but Wilder, anyway – I’ve managed to identify three separate numbers.”

“Records, Garcia,” he cut her off mid-ramble, and she changed course to follow.

“The last three days, he made calls to Walters, the last victim, and about ten different calls at different times to three numbers.” Her voice muffled, as though she had her hand over the phone.

“That’s … office number,” murmured a male voice in the background.

“All three numbers belonging to Dr. Kaplan,” Garcia finished, subdued. “Home, office and cell. Only one was answered-“

The voice again; it had to be Dr. Kaplan. “Is that… blocked number, I didn’t…”

“And that was a call to Dr. Kaplan’s residence, lasting fifteen seconds.”

“He says it was a hang-up, Hotch,” Morgan cut in. “His husband picked up.”

Hotch's phone rang, shrill and loud. "Hold on; Dave? You're on speaker."

"We've got problems, Hotch."

Hotch muttered something under his breath that sounded something like 'you're telling me,' but all he said aloud was "go on."

"We checked on the cult members that Reid IDed – they're gone. Keys and wallets too; everything else was left. The University says neither one showed up for work or class today." Rossi’s voice was half drowned-out by traffic noise, but the details came through well enough.

"You're sure it's connected?"

Emily's voice cut in, strong and confident. "It's connected. They both had the same books we saw in the other homes; Chelsea even had an altar with candles and mistletoe on it in her bedroom closet."

JJ started scribbling notes; if he was losing it, and the only link they had was to his phone calls– she scrawled a couple of words on her notepad and held it up to Hotch.

SAFE HOUSE?

Hotch nodded, and she scrapped that sheet to start making her plans.

"They're preparing for something," Hotch said. "Where are you now?"

"Prentiss and I are just leaving Kessler's place; it's empty."

"He's not there?"

"No, I mean empty. There's nothing there. Looks like he cleared out sometime during the night. He's got to have a bolt-hole somewhere; to store his stuff, if nothing else."

"Morgan, did you get all that?" Hotch directed his words to the other phone, leaning in.

"Some," Morgan replied, and there was the sound of a door closing, then quiet. "Say again?"

"It’s Kessler. He killed two more of his followers, and now he’s in the wind." 

 

**Greenwich Village, NYC:**

 

“Grab only what the two of you will need for a couple of days,” Morgan instructed as Billy held the door of the apartment building open. The FBI agent preceded him in, turning to scan the lobby like there was a chance someone would be crouched in a corner waiting to jump out at them. “Clothes, toiletries, any medications. The rest can wait.”

They’d been dismissed; now that the FBI had what they wanted, they didn’t have a use for Darcy or Kate anymore. Billy, on the other hand – ‘safe house,’ they were calling it. ‘We’ll pick Dr. Altman up after his class. It’s just until we catch this guy.’ It sounded more like house arrest.

Rossi had already spoken to Carol by the time Billy was being bundled into a waiting SUV, like something out of a Grisham movie, and life was getting more surreal by the moment. 

“You can stop looking for ninjas,” Billy replied, more sharply than he’d meant to. “Mr. Jarvis would make them stop for a cup of tea and a crossword before he’d let them spider-man around in here.” The doorman might be old, but he was still a crafty old coot.

Morgan frowned but Jarvis’ thin lips crooked up into a brief smile, so that was alright.

The walk to the elevator was only slightly less awkward than being hauled out by the cops might be. The process could have been interesting, if it were happening to someone else, or in different circumstances, or if Billy could make himself believe that they were actually in any real danger rather than just being packed off out of the way.

He wanted Teddy there; wanted the reassurance of his presence, the warmth of his hands. He flushed with irrational resentment at the seminar Teddy was teaching, glanced at his watch. Another hour until he’d be done.

“I need to ask you about John Kessler,” Agent Prentiss asked, as the three of them waited for the elevator. “Is he an ex-boyfriend?” It wasn’t until then that he realized he’d been hunching over, his shoulders drawn down and tight, his head low. Billy straightened deliberately, popping his neck before he shook his head.

“No. He’s straight, and I was with someone else back then.” Nate, who had been his best friend all through high school, more than that once they’d hit university, and the cause of almost all of the ups and downs of his late 20s. “John was one of Dr. Strange’s other PhD students. There were three of us – Marie was the other. John and I – we weren’t exactly friends.”

“How so?”

“He didn’t like competition,” Billy shrugged. And that was putting it mildly. It had taken months to get the ringing of his voice out of Billy’s head once he’d come home again.

_Come on, Kaplan; you can’t imagine anyone’s going to buy that argument._

“Marie didn’t threaten him; she followed his lead on our project, listened to his suggestions most of the time. And the lab techs loved him. But he saw me as a rival, I guess. Getting grant money that should have been his.”

_So do your parents know Dr. Strange? Really? Hunh. I was wondering why he’d pick you, that’s all._

“If he liked you, he was great. Funny, charming, the whole bit. But underneath he was just a sad, bigoted jerk.”

_Going off to call the wifey? Or is it you that’s the wife, Kaplan?_ _You'd look absolutely deeee-vine_ _in a frilly pink apron._

“So what did you do?” The elevator opened and they piled in, Morgan last after a final scan of the hallway.

“Ignored him, mostly. It wasn’t worth risking getting sent home.” Except– it had been sweet, the feel of John’s chin sinking in under his knuckles, the way his head had jerked back in shock and surprise, the red stain of blood on his lip, on Billy’s knuckles, the undeniable adrenalin rush of violent skin-on-skin. It had been too heady, too real... too easy to enjoy. But John had left Billy mostly alone after that, even when his jaw had gone purple and blue the next day. Stephen had stared them both down silently before shaking his head and walking away.

“Except once,” Billy admitted reluctantly as they reached their floor and the elevator slid open again. “We’d all had a couple of drinks one night, he was giving me crap about being ‘a fag,’ and I punched him.” He paused, waited for a reaction, for condemnation and a lecture from the pair of law enforcement officers.

"I think my line here is 'violence doesn't solve anything?'" Morgan cracked a self-aware smile, grinning at his partner.

“Not my proudest moment,” Billy admitted, fishing for his keys, “but if I had to live the moment over I’d probably do it again.”

"Don't look at me," Prentiss shrugged, the carefully held tension in her walk belying the casual ease of her amused reply. "Some people just need punching."

Billy stopped as they reached the door. Something was off, something was different, but it all looked the same as ever...

"Something wrong?" Morgan asked, and Billy felt rather than saw the agents come to alert.

He touched the door. Pushed with just his fingertips. It swung open, the keys dangling uselessly from his hand.

“Uh,” said Billy, intelligently. “That shouldn’t-“

Morgan pressed him back and away from the door, and Prentiss’ gun was in her hand. They were gesturing and moving together so perfectly in sync they could have been joined telepathically.

Following them in seemed like a worse idea than waiting in the hall. There was a flurry of activity, glimpses of the agents as they moved quickly from room to room, muffled responses of 'clear' – 'clear' – 'clear,' before Prentiss reappeared at the door, holstering her weapon.

 “Come on in,” she instructed, all business now, and stood clear of the door to let them inside. “Don’t touch anything until after forensics gets here, but I need you to look around. Tell me if anything’s missing.”

“It’s strangely clean for a break-in, isn’t it?” Billy said slowly, turning on his heel to survey the apartment as the FBI agents fanned out through the place. It looked the same as it had when he and Teddy had left for work that morning. The breakfast dishes were still in the sink, the X-Box and television in place, a pile of books and mail on the counter– what could they have other than the electronics that would even be tempting?

There was an empty space on the bookshelf, low enough that he had to squat to take a better look.

What had been there? He never bothered alphabetizing anything at home; things just lived where they got stuck after the last time they’d been used. It was one of the inconvenient low shelves that sat halfway behind the TV, not good for anything but storage of the things they ignored.

“Prentiss,” Morgan called from the bedroom, and Billy stood, scrubbing his hands nervously against his pants as he did. He shoved his hands in his pockets to keep himself from running his fingers over everything; like touching them would make them solid, more real than his sight alone could prove. Someone had been in their home – that was only just beginning to feel real. Someone had gone through their things, and stolen a book, and possibly even been in their bedroom-

_Shit._

“Ted-“ Billy headed for the hall, stopping only for a moment to explain. “His mom’s jewelry. It’s in the bedroom.” Agent Prentiss followed him, not immediately on his heels but close enough to let him feel secure.

He rounded the corner and stepped in.

Someone had _definitely_ been in their bedroom.

The knife was long, slender and looked wickedly sharp. It gleamed, both razor-thin edges catching the light where it stood, held upright by the way it had been stabbed into a sheet of paper and through that to the bedcovers and the mattress beneath. The carvings on the intricate hilt – Billy would bet just about anything that it was bone – curled and writhed in sinuous lines, here the impression of a head, there the outline of fangs.

It was undoubtedly a warning. And a clue. And Billy ached to pull it out, to feel the weight, learn the markings and what they meant, to unwrap and unfold every mystery buried deep inside its core.

What was _going_ to happen, was that the people that Morgan was calling on the phone were going to sweep in, wrap it up in plastic, and lose it in an evidence locker for the next twenty years.

The paper, though; that he might have a chance at getting a better look at. Billy stepped forward while Morgan finished talking, holding his hands up in the air at Prentiss’ sharp glare. “Just looking,” he assured her. The dresser drawer where Teddy’s kept his mother’s effects was still closed; everything was there when he opened it – a small green jewelry box with her wedding rings, his father’s dog tags, a few necklaces and earrings that weren’t worth much, even melted down, but that were like the Crown Jewels for him. It was all safe.

Billy relaxed and closed the drawer again, took the chance while Morgan was talking on the phone and Prentiss was snapping pictures to lean in and take a good look at the letter.

The paper was new, an approximation of vellum, and the ink was dark and fresh, but the style was old. _Uncial hand, nib pen, oak gall ink?_ Paleography was never one of the skills from his PhD that he’d expected to employ in quite this sort of circumstance.

“Do you recognize that?” Prentiss asked, but Billy had to shake his head. The writing was precise, uniform and skilled, but utilitarian in its orderly rows. The language – Latin, mostly, with something else; some of the words didn’t make sense.

Prentiss was watching him expectantly, waiting for an answer. “It’s nothing we had before,” he replied after a minute. “Whoever left the knife must have left that as well.”

“What is it?” Morgan frowned. “A warning?”

It was more than that.

“Eis sanitatem nec somnum permittas nisi…” Billy read aloud, the Latin reforming and reshaping behind his eyes. “ _Drive them to the greatest death, and do not allow them health or sleep…_ ” He stopped abruptly, the academic exercise becoming something far more personal. “It’s a curse scroll.” He got blank looks from the other two and gestured with his hands as he tried to explain, drawing images in the air. “In Roman Britain, locals used to write curses on lead tablets and bury them. They were mostly used to petition the gods for small favors. ‘Give boils to the guy who stole my best cow,’ and so on.”

“And this one?” Prentiss asked, trading a glance with Morgan at her side.

“We don’t have a cow, so that can’t be it,” Billy joked uneasily, but the agents barely cracked smiles. He sighed, relented. “A lot more serious than that. There’s more here than just the basic curse; some words I don’t recognize.” He blinked up at them, shoving his glasses up onto his nose with the back of his hand. “I can translate this, but I need one of the books from my office. I’ll run back and get it. If I can get a drive, or borrow the car, it’ll only take a few minutes.”

They were hesitating – they weren’t going to let him go. But he could solve this thing, he knew he could. "This was a message left for me; I'm the one who has the best chance of figuring it out. And if there’s something in here that can help the case, don’t we – _you –_ “ he corrected quickly, “need to know as quickly as possible?”

Morgan and Prentiss had an entire conversation with just their eyes, and then Morgan shrugged in what looked like defeat. “I can drive him down.”

“Do you think that’s such a good idea?” Prentiss looked dubious, and that meant Billy had about a minute and a half to try and convince them both before he lost his chance to make a difference.

“What’re they going to do,” Billy scoffed. “Grab me out of my office with Agent Morgan right there? Security’s been increased triple-fold since...” he stumbled, kept going. “This is a stupid prank meant to bully and intimidate, nothing more, and I’m not going to let some idiot scare me. I can translate this thing. It was meant for me.”

The agents stared at each other for a minute, wordless communication flying back and forth in the raise of an eyebrow, the curl of a lip, and then Prentiss nodded and sighed. “You go on. I’ll wait until the forensics team shows up, then pick up Dr. Altman. We’ll see you at the safehouse.”

 

**History Department Offices, NYCU**

 

Kaplan hadn’t been wrong about the heightened security on campus, Morgan was glad to discover. They got stopped coming on to campus, parking in the lot down the street from the arts building, and then again at the front door. It wouldn’t help if the guards hadn’t seen the APBs out for Kessler and his two stooges, but at least it was better than nothing.

He wouldn’t entirely relax until this whole thing was over. The message at the apartment seemed clear enough – _I want you and I can get to you when I please –_ but there was always the risk that they’d missed something again.

“It’ll just take a minute,” Kaplan promised, unlocking his office door. Morgan got between him and the door, and don’t think for a second that he missed the rolled eyes when he made sure Kaplan was standing back. The chances were slim, but it only ever took that one-in-ten-thousand for a person to get hurt.

The sheer volumes of paper and the teetering piles of books in the office suggested that it was going to take a lot longer than ‘a minute’ to find what he was looking for, but at least there was nowhere in there for someone to be hiding.

“I’m amazed you can find anything in this,” Morgan commented, reholstering his gun.

“I have a system,” Kaplan objected.

 “Alphabetical or dewey decimal?” Morgan joked.

Kaplan flashed a grin. “Stardate. Now shoo, so I don’t have to work around you.”

“I’ll be right here in the hall,” Morgan replied as he stepped out into the dim half-light of the hall. It took a second for his eyes to adjust after the garish fluorescents of Kaplan’s office, but the long, white-tiled hallway was still empty. He paced down to the end, restless, then back again. He could always call Garcia, get an update, but she’d be the first to get in touch if there was any news. It would be better once he could drop Kaplan off and let the officers take over, let he and Prentiss get back out onto the street.

Just how long was he going to take?

\--

_Just going to pick up a book,_ he’d said, and he meant it at the time. But it wouldn’t hurt to stop and look through the lexicon while he was still here, while he had the chance to rummage through and find another one if this didn’t have the information he was looking for.

Because there had been something familiar about some of the wording on the scroll, something that was ringing half a dozen bells in the back of his head, and the easiest thing would be to look it up, prove to himself that his memory was wrong, grab his translations and go.

It would only take a second.

His phone rang.

The sound was bright and shrill in the quiet of his office, and something made him grab it, snatch the handset up before Agent Morgan came in to interrupt. It was probably Teddy, anyway, finished with his lecture and trying to find him. “Kaplan.” 

“Hello, Billy.”

It wasn’t Teddy.

That voice crawled under his skin and nested there, husky-dark and sharp around the edges.

“John.” Red crept up behind his eyes and bile lodged in his throat; this was the man who had broken into his home, killed five people, murdered _Alex-_ “You sick, sad son of a bitch. What do you _want_?”

“I want everything; I thought that would be clear by now,” John replied, and there was something else behind him, a voice, muffled and angry. Did he have another victim there right now? Was he going to make Billy listen as he killed someone?

He needed to call Morgan in here, get him on speaker; they could trace calls like this easily, couldn’t they? Find out where he was calling from?

“That’s a lovely new ring Altman has, by the way,” John continued conversationally, and the bottom dropped out of the world. “I wouldn’t call for help just yet, or you’ll get it back in a box.”

_No. There’s no way. Teddy’s in his lecture, he’s back on campus and he’s totally fine._ “You’re lying,” Billy replied on autopilot. His heart was jackrabbiting in his chest and he held the speed-dial down on his cell phone with his thumb. His fingers were sweaty, his palms worse, and there was that noise in the background of the phone line again, scraping like wood on concrete, and something like someone trying to shout around a gag.

_Come on, Teddy; pick up – pick up!_

“Am I? When was the last time you saw him?”

This morning, dropping in to Teddy’s office with a coffee before Reid and Garcia had arrived. Teddy had thanked him, cupped the back of Billy’s neck with his hand and drawn him in for a kiss, the collar of his shirt flipping up between them.

_Why wasn’t he picking up?_

“Teddy’s with the FBI, you asshole.”

A click – he’d answered; oh thank _God_ -

“You’ve reached Ted Altman, but I can’t come to the phone right now.”

“He looks nice in green, don’t you think?” John was laughing at him now on the office phone, humor tinging his words with darker malice. “It’s definitely his color.”

He was lying; he had to be lying. Because if he wasn’t, that meant Teddy was _there_ and he was in danger, and there was no way around it this time.

“Say I did believe you,” Billy began cautiously. He squeezed his eyes closed against the panic, forcing it down. “What do you want from us?”

“I don’t want him,” John offered, and Billy could just about picture him, leaning back in a chair and lifting the front legs off the ground, arrogant sneer fixed to his lip. “I want you. Only you. No police, no F-B-I-. Just you and me, Kaplan,” he finished, syrup-smooth. “Just like the old days.

“You tell anyone-” his voice cracked out like a whip, “and Abercrombie and Fitch over here dies. Slowly. Painfully. And knowing with every last, gurgling breath that you are the reason for it.”

Every word was a punch to the gut. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t hang on. His hands hurt, and Billy realized he was digging his nails into the old wood of his desk, gouging marks into the varnish. “You still haven’t proved that you even have him,” he ground out. “I want to talk to him. Put Teddy on the phone.”

“No can do,” John replied. “He’s about to take a little nap. But I’ll do you one better.”

Billy’s cell phone beeped with an incoming text.

Teddy. It had to be. He’d seen Billy’s number on the call display, and he was calling back.

_Unknown Number_

The picture text resolved itself across the tiny screen. A green shirt, lying on a concrete floor. Teddy’s, the one he had been wearing this morning. The one with the missing button at the collar.

A dark stain spread across the front of it, the shade impossible to tell in the dim lighting, on the tiny hand-held screen.

He was going to throw up. He was going to fold over and scream and die right there in his office. His heart dropped low into his body, leaving an echoing hollow behind. _Teddy Teddy Teddy-_

“Where?” Billy choked out, some tiny portion of his brain that was still capable of rational thought impressed that he was able to get out the word.

“I’ve already given you all the clues you need, genius. Come find me. Before he takes your place.

“Remember – tell anyone, he dies. Come with anyone, he dies.

“Clock’s ticking. Tick. Tick. Tick…”

The line went dead.

Billy’s cell phone hung heavy and cold in his hand. He dialed Teddy’s number one more time, just… just in case.

_He has to be lying._

There was no answer.

There was no way in hell Billy was going to take that chance.

\--

His five minutes were up; Morgan glanced back at the light spilling from Kaplan’s office door and turned to go get him. Whatever he had in there that was so important, there had to be a way to work around it.

He got three steps back down the hall before his phone rang. Rossi; damn. He stopped in his tracks and answered; give the doc another minute or two. This had to be important.

“What’s up, Rossi?”

“You know how some cases just keep getting better and better?”

Goddammit. Morgan rubbed his hand over his head and groaned. “Don’t tell me. Another one.”

“Another _two._ ”

It almost wasn’t worth asking. “Kessler’s missing followers?”

“Not exactly. Intel finally came in on Dr. Strange and that last grad student – Marie D'Ancanto. Both dead. Strange was killed last year in Bermuda, D’Ancanto six months ago in Canada. Throats slit.”

And that hadn’t been what he’d been expecting to hear. “Why didn’t it come up on the original searches?”

“International databases, so they didn’t come up automatically, and neither of them were killed ritual-style. D’Ancanto’s looked like a home invasion, and Strange was flagged as a mugging. Never registered until JJ couldn’t get in touch with either of them, and someone thought to check death records.”

“Damn!” Morgan paced back down the hall away from the office, clenching his fist and resisting the urge to smack the metal double doors in frustration. The sound echoed back down the hallway, reverberating and followed by a soft scuff. This hadn’t been cleaning up loose ends; he’d begun with the original research team. That meant something important. This was more than just professional rivalry with Kaplan, or megalomania finding a focus. This was something deeply personal.

“So that leaves Kaplan as our only link.” Morgan frowned at the phone as though Rossi could see him. “On the plus side, it means Kessler’s not likely to skip town until he’s seen this through.”

\--

Billy scrambled for his books, his hands shaking and his breathing harsh. He only had a moment more before Morgan came to find him. John had left him breadcrumbs; he had to follow them.

_Focus. Breathe. You can do this._

The line – ' _pro quo valde timenda..._ ' It was a quote. Part of something older, something longer, something far beyond whatever John was trying to prove. It wasn’t in the index of the first book he tried; none of the segments looked familiar. The second one, though; the first-line index coughed up his answer, and then he was flipping back through the pages with fumbling, half-working fingers, the edges of the paper rough against his skin.  

There.

He called up the picture of the scroll that he’d managed to snap with his phone, in the chaos.

_Nam hac in hora aliquod inauditum in mundo peccatum perpetratum est, pro quo valde timenda judicialis est vindicta_.

And then the dictionary, to clarify, but he wasn’t that rusty.

“For at this hour a sin unheard of in the world has been committed, for which rigorous vengeance that is justly due is very much to be feared.”

The Life of St. Columba. Irish, which figured. The whole thing was a message, and it was aimed right at him. But what, then, had been his sin?

There was only one way to find out, and that would be to find _him_. Find him, stop him.

Save Teddy.

The connection made sense; there was a Church of St. Columba at 7th and West 18th, or at least there had been. Billy had gone there just after they’d decommissioned it, taken his students, snapped photographs of all the artwork, the gorgeous glass windows, the statues and icons, before the pieces were shipped off to wherever Catholics stored all their treasures.

He’d published an article using some of those pictures just last year.

Billy turned his phone to silent and shoved it back in his pocket.

_What the hell am I doing?_

The only thing he _could_ do. If he called Morgan over and told him, if they showed up with guns and sirens and Kevlar- Teddy would die. And then Billy would die, because he would never be able to recover.

The door was ajar just enough to get a peek around; Agent Morgan was standing at the far end of the hall, his back to the door, talking on his phone. There wasn’t going to be a better time.

Billy slipped quietly down the hall, in the other direction, not bothering to turn off his office light. His shoe scuffed a little on the floor as he turned the corner, but there was no answering shout following him as he headed for the back entrance. It was alarmed, but his keycard would work.

A moment later and he was out, letting the door slip closed behind him. The click of the latch seemed to echo, but still no-one came. The night air was still chilly, a bite in it that summer would eventually destroy. You couldn’t see stars from here, not really, but they were up there somewhere cold and implacably watchful. He shivered, and pulled his coat tighter around himself. The church wasn’t far, and there was a shortcut through a couple of backlots that would shave fifteen minutes off the trip, easily. Twenty, if he ran.

Billy began to run.  

\--

Enough was enough. Morgan banged on the office door once with the side of his fist to catch Kaplan’s attention, then stuck his head around the jamb. “I get that this is important, doc-“

The office was empty, only the scrambled piles on his desk showing that he had ever been there.

“God _damn_ ,” Morgan cursed, backing out and back into the hall. Where the hell could he have gone? No-one else had been in the hall, he’d have sworn that on his own grave – except he’d been right _there_ and apparently Kaplan had found a way to get out. What the _fuck_?

 He hadn’t come past Morgan at the one end, that was for damn sure. The hallway ran down past the department office on the other side, then around a corner – maybe he’d gone to get something there. “Kaplan?” Morgan shouted, jogging quickly– nothing. The department lounge was dark and empty, the office the same. “Come on, man. Don’t do this.”

There was a back door around the corner, and a chill in the air. An LED on the security panel blinked red a couple of times before flashing back to green.

Morgan shoved the door open, jamming his foot in it to prevent it from closing and ignoring the high-pitched electronic complaint from the security system. There was no-one on the sidewalk, no-one crossing the street, a big fat no-one visible at all on this end of the locked-down campus.

When he found Kaplan, he was going to kill him himself.

His phone was out and to his ear; Hotch caught it on the first ring.

“Morgan? Where are you?”

This conversation was not going to be one of his best ever.

“At the college. I lost Kaplan.” He stepped back inside, let the door close behind him. Kaplan had bailed from his office; something had to have triggered it. A phone call, something left for him in one of his books-

“What do you mean ‘lost’?”

What the hell did it sound like he meant? Morgan clenched his teeth, breathed in to settle his flash of temper. This was his fuck-up, not Hotch’s, and it wasn’t going to do anybody any good if he blew up at his supervisor for his own screw-up. “I mean lost, Hotch. I stepped into the hall to talk to Rossi for a couple of minutes, and he must have slipped out the back door. He can’t have more than a minute of lead time on me, but he’s not here.”

He heard voices in the background as Hotch passed on the information, then his voice, clear again. “Do you have any idea where he was heading?”

Kaplan’s desk was a disaster, but a couple of things were obviously different than when he’d come in. A notepad, a pen dropped beside it, books left open that weren't there before. “Looks like he was working on the translation. He hasn’t taken any notes, but there are a couple of books open. One about saints, and a Latin dictionary. Dammit, Hotch. I swear I was no more than twenty feet away.”

“It’ll be faster to get you here than to get Reid out there. Bring the books and the notepad back to the precinct, now.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two more chapters to go! Thank you so much for sticking with me this far!
> 
> \--
> 
> More on curse tablets, and some fun surviving examples: http://curses.csad.ox.ac.uk/ 
> 
> \--
> 
> English translation of quotes from _The Life of St. Columba_ are taken from http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/T201040/  
>  Reeves, William (trans). Färber, Beatrix, Ed. Funded by University College, Cork and Professor Marianne McDonald via the CELT Project. (2004) (2008). Distributed by CELT online at University College, Cork, Ireland. Text ID Number: T201040, Chapter 16.  
> The latin is quoted from _Medieval Sourcebook: Adamnan: Life of St. Columba_ , [Latin Text: Book I and Book II, cc 1-30]. Found at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/columba-l.asp
> 
> \--
> 
> There is an actual St. Columba Parish in NYC (about two blocks over and eight blocks up from my version), but the church and location (ab)used in this fic are entirely fictional. Any resemblance is utter coincidence.


	5. Thursday, pt. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein help is needed, and help is granted.

**St. Columba's Parish, NYC**

 

Nights were never really dark in the city, no matter how few streetlights there were in the immediate area. The neon and halogen from a hundred different sources kept a faint orange/yellow glow in the air, drowning out any hope of seeing any but the most determined stars.

Even still, the old church  _felt_  dark. It wasn’t even technically a church any more, just an old stone building with a steeple that once held bells, surrounded by safety fencing and signs full of dingy pictured promises. In a year or two it would be sectioned off and turned into apartments, but even that would be somehow more respectful than this slow, empty decay.

Billy stood on the sidewalk and jammed his fists into his pockets. It loomed against the skyline, jagged-edged and implacable. There were the wide main doors in front of him of course, but that would be asking for trouble. There was a set of stairs off to the side, leading up to a smaller access door, and he headed off in that direction.

His feet crunched on the gravel, and the noise of the traffic on the streets beyond seemed to muffle, caught in the moment’s hush.

The little set of metal stairs was old, burgundy paint hanging off the railings in flakes and sharp-edged pieces. He hesitated before putting his hand to the door handle. If this were a horror movie, of course, this would be the moment when the door swung open untouched, luring the hero in to meet his final challenge.

It was too bad that he wasn’t exactly a hero. Teddy looked like a proper hero, all shoulders and endless compassion and perfect teeth. Billy was more of the comic relief guy. The funny sidekick. The dorky but well-meaning friend who stuck by the hero and then got killed in the second-to-last act, to give everyone else motivation to fight on.

He grasped the handle. The metal was cold in his hand, colder than maybe it should be?

Or he had the imagination of a hyper-active thirteen year old, let loose on Froot Loops and the SciFi Hallowe’en marathon.

The door was locked. And didn’t that just figure? No trap here, just his own overactive thoughts, making things up to make himself feel important.

He jimmied the handle again, just to be sure. The latch clicked over. The door opened.  

_I’m coming, T. I’m on my way. Just... be there. Be there when I get inside._

The hallway inside was dark, and he stubbed his toe against something that turned out to be a stair. There was a flight going up, and one going down. If he was an evil whackjob, he’d definitely choose the basement for his evil deeds.

Down it was. There must have been emergency lighting in there at some point but it was long gone now, and Billy fished in his pocket to find his cell. A flashlight would have been a lot more useful, but at least the glow from the screen when he turned it back on – not looking at the message count, nope – picked out the edges of the steps in an eerie blue witchlight.

Seven, eight, nine – the metal underneath his feet rang out into the silent dark. The place felt empty, honestly. The only things he was likely to encounter down here would be rats. Almost certainly some spiders. Roaches. This had been a bad idea.

Ten.

There was concrete floor under his feet now, not staircase, and the walls opened up onto a much larger room. The cell light couldn’t show him much further than a couple of feet around himself, but even that was enough to get a sense of things. This part looked empty, but there was a tall shape – a candlestick, almost the same height as him, with a fresh taper.

He turned, moved further into the room, holding the phone in front of him to light the way. There – that was different. A pale shape to the side, indistinct in the shadows, but it looked round, medium-sized, almost like a face.

_Teddy? God no, please, no. If I have any credit left with you, God; anything at all-_

It was a face, blue-lit and slack, upside down with hair streaming toward the ground, the girl’s throat slit open above her chin as she hung.

The floor was slick when he jumped back, the yell of surprise catching on the bile rising in his throat. He looked up, couldn’t stop himself; she was bound upside down, streaks of black  _(that would have been red in the light-)_  marking rivers down her face and pooling in a basin set below-

_It’s not_ him _-_

His knees were locked, the light shaking as his hands shook; he fumbled with his phone with fear-sweat slick fingers and turned to run, his shoes slipping on the floor.

He saw the movement too late, just out of the corner of his eye. A flash of silver, the cut of a jawline, short, dark hair. Pain shooting bright across his head. The tilting of the world as he fell.

Everything went black.                     

 

**6th Precinct, NYC**

 

The precinct was chaos by the time Morgan squealed into the parking spot by the door and ran up the low, wide stairs. He could hear raised voices by the time he was passing the reception desk, and he could make out words over the hubbub of voices.

 “Why didn’t you _stop_  him?”

“Since when has saying ‘no’ to Billy ever stopped him from doing  _anything,_  Tom? Besides; I wasn’t even _there_. I didn’t know anything about it until the FBI pulled me out of my class.”

Ted Altman was in the center of it all, standing perfectly still and the muscles in his jaw working overtime. He was all but looming over another man, who, except for his white-blond hair, could have been the missing professor.

_Twin brother. Right._  He’d been in the files; Tom Shepherd, also adopted, but not by the Kaplans.  Garcia had cleared him pretty much immediately, and Morgan had all but forgotten. Too many other things to keep straight in his head to worry about family members of non-suspects.  

It was going to be hard to forget him now, fists balled tight and only Darcy Lewis’ fierce grip on his arm apparently preventing him from launching himself at Altman.

He shook Lewis off and jabbed at Altman with a finger instead, but Prentiss was striding toward him, JJ was getting in the middle, calm as a rock, and Morgan missed whatever Shepherd said in response.

“Prentiss. What the hell?” he asked, exasperation and irritation bubbling over in his voice.

“Want to be mad at someone?” Altman’s voice cut in, “be mad at him.” And the weight of four pairs of eyes turned to follow Morgan as he and Prentiss pushed through the crowd to get to the back room.

Great.

“Reid called Dr. Bishop for help translating that curse scroll that Kessler left,” Prentiss said, shaking her head. Either she or Altman called the brother, and he showed up with Lewis in tow about five minutes ago. JJ’s playing referee.” She pushed the door open and he followed, dropping the books down on the table.

“There are things that Reid doesn’t know?” Morgan asked.

“There are things that Reid doesn’t know  _yet_ ,” Reid corrected him from his seat at the table, a map spread out in front of him.

Kate Bishop was already in there, standing by the table and looking between the tablet in her hand and photographs of the original letter, laid out in front of her. She was dressed to the nines, all long legs and high heels under a little black dress, her long dark hair wound up on a complicated knot.

The tablet stylus shoved behind her ear was probably a new addition.

“Are those from Billy’s desk?” she asked, all business, and Morgan nodded. He grabbed the books and flipped them open to the places he’d marked before packing them up.

“I was in the hallway for no more than five minutes. Ten at the most,” he explained, forearms braced and his hands flat against the table. Her glance at him lingered for a second on the tattoo peeking out from under the sleeve of his shirt, then up to his face. “So whatever it was he found, it’s something that was obvious to him, and important enough that he felt the need to run off and face it on his own.”

Kate tapped another line of translated text into her tablet and snorted. “There are a lot of things that are obvious only to Billy. That man’s got a mind that works at ninety degrees from the rest of the world. Now. Show me what he had, and step back so I can work.”

 

****St. Columba's, NYC:**   
**

Everything hurt. That was the first thing that struck him.  _Well, no. The first thing that had struck him was whatever that bastard had hit him with._

Then,  _Teddy_.  _Where is he._

The world was dark. The air was musty, the chill from the concrete floor seeping up through his skin. The bones in his feet ached from it, and he shuffled his feet out of reflex. Nothing hurt beyond the cold; not on his feet, at least. His head was hammering, pain pulsing behind his eyes and the back of his head. He was still in the basement.

He was sitting on a chair, his hands were tied painfully close behind his back, the rope cutting and rough. His wrists burned and his fingers were wet, the iron-tang smell of blood in the air.

A light flared, flame and pain, and his eyes slammed shut despite themselves.

Even behind his eyelids he could see the ambient light increasing, the room growing brighter, and he had to – he had to chance it, had to know.

Alex’s face, grey and hollow, lingered there in the darkness. Teddy’s face, his throat slashed like the girl’s, bleeding black and red.

Billy opened his eyes.

There were candles, lit now, set all around the room. Some in tall candlesticks, others clustered on a table, all of them shedding the same yellow light. The air was already starting to thicken with the tendrils of black smoke they gave off, the sickly-sweet smell of beeswax starting to overpower the must.

Beyond the candles– the bile rose in his throat and he fought it down.  _Can’t do that, not here_.  _Lose your lunch later._  Beyond the candles, but still caught in the edge of the spill of light, he could make out two forms, one on either side, hanging, still, cold, white. The basin he had seen before was gone, no sign of it but the dark pools on the floor half-hidden in flickering shadows. 

“It’s good to see you again.” That voice crawled out of the blackness behind him, smooth and smug and all too familiar. Billy stiffened, jerked away from John reflexively as the man passed by him and stepped into Billy’s line of sight.

_Older;_  that was a dumb thing to think; Billy had changed in the last few years as well, even found a grey hair sneaking in among the black the other day, and Teddy had teased him about it-

Oh god.  _Teddy._

“Where  ** _is he_**?” Billy ground out, his voice harsh from the smoke that was already seeping into his lungs.

“Alive. Not here. I did say I wanted this to be just you and me, didn’t I?”

_Alive._  The word sang in Billy’s veins, beating with the rhythm of his heart.

 “And you were so obliging. It’s nice to know that you’ve learned to listen to your betters,” John continued, the long black robe somehow looking natural on him rather than the massive joke it should have been. His hair was short, still brown; there were lines on his face that hadn’t been there before.

The candles flickered with the breeze he made as he walked by, his shadow splitting for a moment into a three-headed mass before resolving again.  _Ceberus, guardian of hell._    

“You’ve been around,” Billy’s voice cracked, his mouth was dry. He swallowed hard against it, tried to get his throat working. This was his chance, though it was playing out so differently than he’d imagined. 

_Teddy’s alive_. Now he had to figure out where, had to keep John talking until he could get them both out. “You should have come to say hi. I had no idea you were in town.”

John turned, a book in his hand; Billy couldn’t make out the title. “I did,” he said, with a grin that was more teeth than amusement. “You weren’t home.”

He opened the book, flipped a page, and cocked his head. “Overall,” he read aloud, “the witch and coven were symbols of the community’s anxieties, generated not from whole cloth but from a reified cultural archetype that played upon contemporary fears.” The rhythm of the words was familiar, intimately so, and Billy knew the next line before John spoke it aloud. “No evidence exists, in either the material or legal record, to support the local oral history, and so it is to the realm of literature that we must now turn for further context.”

His book. His first book. The one spun off from his doctoral thesis, that heavy black printing on the cover with his name front and center. He’d given Aaron a signed copy as his Chanukah present, as a joke, and gotten the damned thing back annotated and wrapped in a fruitcake box the next year.

At least John hadn’t stolen  _that_  copy.

“It’s very well written,” John was saying, standing in the center of the pool of light. He held it open in both hands, his chin high. “Except for the part where you’re wrong, of course.”

The world shifted, and he was back in England, back around that damned table in the museum, watching John rant on and on about the suppressed evidence, the repression of the church, the glimmers of remnants of hints that he saw in every marginal drawing and crossed-out phrase in the eight hundred year old documents.

“You’re not still going on about that?” Billy shot out, keeping his head up. Damn it; he was supposed to be being nice to him. Wasn’t that what worked in the crime shows? Be nice, get sympathy, keep him talking until the cavalry arrived?

Except that no-one knew where he was. Because he was an idiot, and no-one was coming.

But then again… there was a pressure against his thigh, hard and familiar. John had gotten him onto a chair, tied him up, but hadn’t searched him. Hadn’t taken the cell phone from his pocket. If he could buy himself some time, then maybe…

“We’ve had this discussion before,” he tried again, aiming for ‘conciliatory’ and probably falling flat somewhere around ‘sheepish.’ “Stories like the covens, the druids, the powers– they were useful because people believed them, because they needed them to be true – not because powers were real.”

“You were  _there_ , Bill,” John interrupted, closing Billy’s book and setting it aside on the small table behind him. It would have served him right if the sleeve of his robe had caught fire just then, but no such luck. “You were there with us. You saw the same things that I did in the records, saw the  _power_  that’s waiting for the right person to take it.

“You just chose to give in to the pressure. To parrot the party line and ignore the proof that was right in front of us the entire time.”

Billy twisted his hands, inch by careful inch. There was very little give in the rope, and the knots were solid. He’d done this before, which,  _duh, Kaplan,_ but then Billy’s fingers brushed the ends and there was a loop to catch his finger into, and maybe work the knot from there. 

John’s eyes were burning feverishly bright, his hands half-raised with his palms up, the light around and under and behind him and making his face glow like an angel’s. “You gave in, Kaplan. You closed your eyes to the truth. Marie was blind and obstinate; Stephen stole my research, buried my findings. He was scared of what I'd uncovered. But now you’ll be my witness.”

Witness to what? The bodies, the candles, the smoke and the blood– Billy stopped trying to tug at the rope behind his back and sat perfectly still while his mind spun. He opened his mouth to ask, but then, he didn’t really need to. He’d seen Rossi’s pictures, spun half the theories they were working from.

If he didn’t get his hands free and get to his phone, the next thing Teddy was going to be seeing was a picture of Billy that looked pretty much the same.

“This is a bit of an overreaction to not getting a tenure-track job, don’t you think?” Billy suggested, and a flash of familiar old irritation skewed John’s face, replaced a second later by that same cherubic smile. The false innocence of it overlaid his face in gruesome juxtaposition, a mask on a grinning skull. “What kind of power do you think is waiting for you? There’s no such thing as magic, John. It’s folklore and religion and  _passion_  wrapped around coincidence.”

The bully was one thing; he knew how to deal with that. This messiah thing… this was entirely new, and the cold ball of terror sitting firmly in his gut, the fierce and stinging pain in his wrists where the rope had rubbed him raw... he had no contingency plans for this.

He had to find Teddy. Get him out. Get them home.

His hands slipped and slid, the rope cut in and he bit the inside of his cheek to stifle the yelp of pain. His wrists would heal. ‘Dead’ wouldn’t.

 

**6th Precinct, NYC:**

 

This hadn't been the way Darcy had planned on spending her evening. Not that she had big party plans or anything; not with funerals coming up, for people she had known, and (mostly) liked. But hanging out in the police station trying to prevent her boyfriend from getting arrested for assault – yeah, maybe it was kind of predictable. But it still sucked.

"Did you even try to call him?" Tommy was running off at the mouth, his face tight and pinched, and honest to God, the only reason he was on the attack was because he didn't do 'bowel-loosening terror' well. Not that Ted looked like he cared.

"What do you think? His phone's off, or he's not answering."

Blonde FBI was speeding over and about to get involved, and that would end in all of them getting kicked out and learning nothing.

There was only one truly helpful option in times of crisis: What Would Pepper Do?

Darcy grabbed Tommy's arm again and pulled him back, shoving him gently into a chair. "You, there. Sit." She pointed at Teddy imperiously and raised an eyebrow over the dark rims of her glasses. "You, sit there." And she pointed to a chair a few feet away.

Amazingly, after a moment's pause, he did, sitting stiffly on the edge of the chair, his back rigid, his face impassive, and his fists clenched in his lap.

With Ted parked and out of trouble, she perched on the arm of Tommy's chair, and gently ruffled his hair. "Bossy," he muttered darkly, not looking at her. He had sunk down immediately, face in his hands, but he pushed his head up into her fingers, cat-like, as she scratched.

"You know it," Darcy murmured, not up for the usual flirty call-and-response, her heart was breaking for both of them. And for herself, honestly. How could it not?

"The dumbshit," Tommy cursed, and she kept scratching, running the tips of her fingers through his ridiculously fair hair. "He should have called me; I'd have-"

"Gone with him and both gotten in trouble," Darcy interrupted, because yeah. You learned a few things about a guy and his family dynamics after a couple of years. "The two of you don't have the greatest track record when it comes to impulse control, you recognize that, right? It's like hanging with the cast of Jackass when you two idiots start egging each other on." 

"Bullshit," Tommy grunted, still seething, but the tension in the back of his neck was fading.

"I call 'bullshit' on your 'bullshit,'" Darcy replied easily. "Stag party in Atlantic City? Say it with me– Seemed-"

"Like a good idea at the time," Tommy finished her sentence, and then he did look up at her, green eyes not at all looking suspiciously wet or afraid, because Tommy didn't 'do' emotion. He didn't 'do' emotion like Darcy didn't 'do' chocolate, but whatever. Everyone was allowed their weird pride things. “It was awesome, for the record. No-one actually got charged with anything. And it’s not like you weren’t there, Calamity Jane,” he added, bravado back on, and she kicked him, gently.

He was all twitches and tics now, raking his hands through his hair and his knee bouncing non-stop. 

"I plead the fifth. So if we're agreed that wonder twin power wouldn't have saved the day," she kept going, sliding her hand down to cup the back of his neck and ground him in place. "Can we talk about something else?" Tommy turned and looked at Ted, and she felt his frown in the muscles shifting and pulling under his skin.

Ted was the opposite to Tommy’s constant, directionless motion, slumping slowly back in his chair and staring across the room at the closed doors. It was like all his walls had come down once no-one was paying him any attention, and the blank look of abject misery on his face would haunt her for just about ever.

“Yeah,” Tommy went still under her hand, his eyes fixed on Ted, then got up. He put his hands in his pockets and walked over, all edges and sharp angles. Ted looked up at him, fingers laced together, and they stared for a moment. “He’ll be fine, you know,” Tommy began, slouching and softening, his corners curling in on themselves.

“I don’t know that,” Ted replied, his voice cracking on the third word. He rubbed his face and his hands were shaking. “Neither do you.” He rose to his feet abruptly. Tommy didn’t step away. “We should be  _doing_  something,” Ted turned on him, gesturing in a futile wave at the closed door where Kate had vanished with the FBI. “Going with the patrols, or checking the campus; we know the layout. We could be out there finding him, instead of waiting in here doing nothing, while Billy could be  _dead_  – or worse.”  

“The FBI’s not going to let a couple of professors, an admin and a corporate lawyer go running around the downtown like some messed-up Scooby gang.”

“He’s in  _trouble_ , Tommy. He’s out there and there’s a  _psycho_  looking for him,” Ted’s voice rose in volume and fervor as he went on, and there were a bunch of the cops glancing up and over at them to see what all the fuss was about. “And the FBI are just sitting there not  _doing_  anything.”   

“Just sitting around having a smoke, right? Sit down and shut up,” Tommy suggested, with something like fondness. Tommy sat, folding down into the chair and sticking his legs out into the middle of the hallway. Ted didn’t, the tops of his ears red and everything about his posture tight and angry.

“Or not, your problem. But half the cops in the city, if not more, are out looking for Billy, and the FBI’s got a brain trust of serious proportions in there working on the same thing. You’re stuck here and I’m not leaving, so you may as well bitch to me instead of losing your mind and punching out a cop. I don’t have cash on hand to bail you out if you get arrested for disturbing the peace.”

Darcy totally wasn’t holding her breath, but she did breathe a little more easily once Ted blinked at Tommy, then unclenched his hands. He sank down into the chair between them, and didn’t react when Darcy laid a hand on his closest shoulder. “I can’t lose him,” he muttered, between the hands he had pressed to his face. “I  _can’t._ ”

 

**St. Columba's, NYC:**

 

“All these words, Bill; all these hundreds and thousands of words written about witchcraft and magic, and you still don’t believe? And here I thought you were developing a more open mind than that,” John dismissed him, turned and walked away. Billy yanked against the ropes, felt the knots give, just that little bit more. He could move his fingers now, pull his arms toward the side.

“I’ve done what I needed to do to make it all work,” John kept talking, his back to Billy now and his hands busy in front of him.

The edge of his pocket was just within reach; he could brush the edge of it with his fingers. Just a little more– Keep him talking. “And the people you killed? What kind of role did they play in all this?”

He couldn’t see what John was doing at the table, but the clinking of metal on metal couldn’t mean anything good.

“ _Fide sanguineque_ , Bill,” John chided gently, as though he were lecturing a child. “Power comes from  _belief_  and  _blood._  They believed, and gave their blood. Now the wards are set around the city, the moon rises, and you will bear witness as the gods favor  _me_.”

His shoulders screamed from the strain, his right arm extended past bearing, but there it was, the curve of the top of his phone at the edge of his pocket. He shifted his weight in the chair, lifted his hip, his fingertips scrabbling along the smooth surface without purchase. The chair rocked under him and the rope cut in further, razor-sharp fibers sinking into his flesh. Pain, pain and red iron in his mouth, spots flashing in his eyes and the edge of the phone sliding home between his fingers-

The sickle gleamed in the firelight when John lifted it, ran his thumb along the wickedly curved edge. He turned.

Was this what Alex had seen, at his last moment alive?

_Teddy, I’m so sorry. If I get out of this, I swear; I’ll be better. I’ll listen. I’ll keep my word. I swear, I’ll make this right, if I can only get us home. I’m so, so sorry._

There was a button under one finger. He couldn’t reach– the chair rocked, wobbled under his weight. Just a little more-

Hip up, finger down, he found the button– the chair went sideways and he went with it, the floor rushing up to meet him. His shoulder hit first, then his hip, his glasses falling from his face and his phone spinning free, skittering across the unswept floor.

The world dimmed, but didn’t quite go black. Not this time. Over the rushing of his pulse and a tangled, choking sob, he heard the familiar, mocking sound of John's laughter.

 

**6th Precinct, NYC:**

 

"Righteous vengeance, death and insomnia – this guy knows how to hit all the high points.” Kate folded her arms and scowled at the photographs littering the table in front of her. "His reading list needs some variety."

Morgan stepped in behind her and glanced at her tablet as if it would be obvious from that alone. No such luck. “What are you seeing?”

She glanced back over her shoulder, then tapped one of the pictures. "This section here is classical Latin," she explained without preamble. "Used between the first century BCE and the second century CE. It's what we're taught in school. It's a lot more complicated, style-wise, to this-" she pointed at a section she'd circled. “See how the wording changes? He’s quoting from something old."

Look for the differences, the incongruities; that was the first thing. Kate's eyes flashed with understanding, his excitement reflected in them. "If it's a quote, what's it from?"

"It's simplified church Latin," Kate explained, drumming her fingertips on the desk. "Seventh or eighth century. The interesting thing is some of the words – they look like celtic loanwords, with Latinized spellings."

Reid had been skimming through Kaplan's books on the other side of the table, his finger trailing down the page and his lips moving silently. He flipped the page, then looked up and blinked owlishly. "Wait." He flipped forward through the book, landed on a page that he pressed open with long, slender fingers. "Seventh century, celtic, this is it!  _Vita Columbae_ , The Life of Columba." 

“Dammit,” Kate cursed under her breath, a comment that seemed aimed more at herself than anyone else. “Let me see that.” Reid held his finger under the quote, and even Morgan could see that the tiny letters tracked with the handwritten note. “He’s right. This is the direct quote.”

“What does that mean?” Morgan asked. “Is the page number relevant? The book edition?”

Kate shook her head, and her jaw set. “There’s a St. Columba’s church a couple of blocks from campus. Billy took a class there once.”

Garcia’s fingers were already flying, and Morgan didn’t have to specify what he was asking for. “Baby doll?”

“St. Columba’s parish, shut down and congregation consolidated with St. Francis Xavier’s five years ago, slated to become an apartment development eventually. Right now it’s a big old mess of empty. And probably rats.”

Reid was looking over her shoulder then moved back to scan his map, poking a finger right in the epicenter of a half-dozen little red pushpins. “It’s right in the center of his comfort zone. This is it.”

Garcia handed Morgan a neon-pink post-it with the address scrawled on it, and flashed him a faint and hopeful smile. “Go get ‘em, tiger.”

\--

The door to the back room opened and Darcy sat up immediately, watching the rush of chaos. The FBI agents were on the move, pulling black bulletproof vests on over their clothes and talking rapidly to each other. Three, no,  _four_  of them burned out of there, one of them barking orders to the rest, and the quiet conversation between Ted and Tommy died away.

Kate followed in stocking feet, all dressed up for a party and carrying some blingtastic Louboutins in her hand. She was dragging ass as badly as the rest of them, and she came over and slid into the seat on Tommy’s other side without a word.

Ted sat upright, his knuckles white and his hands clenched on the arms of his chair. “What’s happened? Did you find him?”

“Not yet,” Kate put up a hand before he started yelling again. “But I got them an address. There was a reference to a nearby church. It may not be where this guy is now, but I’d bet everything that’s where Billy went.”

“And the FBI?”

“Believed me. They’re going now.”

Ted let out a shaky breath, and he dropped his head, pressed his hands to his face. He wasn’t going to start crying, was he? But no– he just breathed for a couple of minutes, while everyone else sat close by and kept watch.

Until Tommy looked Kate over, anyway.

Tommy raised an eyebrow. “You look awfully dressed up.”

“I had a thing.”

Baiting Kate was easily one of Tommy’s favorite pastimes. He leaned back in his chair and spread his arms wide across the backs of the two on either side, and if that ended up with his hand lightly resting in a comforting spot against Ted’s shoulder, Darcy wasn’t going to say a damned thing about it. “A thing?”

“A ‘daddy needs to show off his daughter so the shareholders think he’s amazing’ benefit thing,” Kate explained, and Darcy made a sympathetic face. “I’d say this call was a welcome escape, but under the circumstances-“ She frowned at Ted. “How’re you holding up?”

“Not so good,” Ted admitted after a pause, staying slumped where he was, his forehead pressed against his fists. .

“I can call Eli, if you want,” Kate suggested, but Ted shook his head.

“Don’t. There’s nothing for him to do here.” He managed a half-assed sort of smile. “More people would just get us kicked out.”

Kate raised an eyebrow at Darcy, over Ted’s head, but she mimed a shrug and a frown. He was probably right, but… “He’ll be pissed that he missed the party,” Darcy suggested.

Tommy tipped his head back, and watched Teddy through one slitted eye. “That’s fine,” he replied with a studied casualness. “He and Billy can complain about it together tomorrow.”

Ted flinched, and Kate moved her chair forward to close ranks. “He’ll be fine,” Tommy repeated, before anyone else could say anything. “Billy’s got the luck of the stupid. He could fall into a port-a-potty and come up with a fistful of diamonds. You guys will make a killing off the book and movie options.”

Ted shook his head, but he sat up and leaned back, effectively trapping Tommy’s arm. Neither man moved. “If he doesn’t come back in one piece,” he said after a moment, “I’m going to kill him myself. What the  _hell_  did he think he was doing?” He was getting angrier again, and that was actually better than seeing him miserable.

“He’s done dumber things in the past,” Kate offered, and Ted frowned.

“Name one.”

 

**St. Columba's, NYC:**

 

The metal chalice was cold against his lip, the wine hot and bitter. Billy choked and gasped, spat it out as fast as John could pour it in, but not enough. Liquid ran down his chin and splashed onto his chest, plastering his shirt to his skin. John's fingers pinched his nose again and he couldn't breathe, could only gasp for air and shake his head in violent attempt to free himself before – too late. Blood-warm wine filled his mouth and he swallowed compulsively, the heat spreading through his body faster than it should.

There was grit on his tongue, bitter and fine. That wasn’t good, couldn’t be good; he had to get rid of it, spit it out, before whatever gleamed in the depths of the chalice made more than his head spin.

Candlelight shouldn’t be so bright; the lights burned when he looked into them, split and reformed into a dozen, two-dozen flickering points of brilliance. Red, orange, yellow they danced, black smoke winding up, curling and reforming into shapes.

They writhed in the smoke, the curlicues of the knife handle, serpents curling and uncurling, entwining and seducing. His pulse was a drumbeat, the drums beat a funeral dirge, and in the smoke and haze he saw hands reaching for him. They curled around John, black smoke and insubstantial, and he arched, reached skyward, silhouetted in the fire and the light.

Chanting echoed off the walls, one voice, a hundred, haunted whispers murmured in his ears, shapes and shadows there, then gone again.

The air was thick, hard to breathe, sick-sweet and liquid in his nose and throat. There was no ground beneath him, and he was falling, forever.

\--

The church looked quiet and empty from the outside, ringed with larger, more modern buildings that overshadowed the old brick spire. The call had been ‘no sirens’ when they got close, and the SWAT team piled out of the SUVs behind Morgan’s as the BAU moved in. Prentiss had Morgan’s back, like always, and Hotch gestured to them to take the back door. The bright FBI on the black tac vests stood out like beacons in the darkness.

“Move in.” The command came through over his earpiece and Morgan tried the handle on the old metal door. It swung open easily, and he was the first man inside.

Inside wasn’t as quiet. He caught the sounds of drums, and one voice chanting in an off-key monotone. It made it easier to get down the stairs without being heard.

No resistance, no sign they’d been overheard– Morgan stopped at the base of the stairs, waited for Prentiss to come down beside him. She cocked her head–  _I’ll take it?_ He held up three fingers, gestured to the other side of the door.

The SWAT guys behind him were poised, waiting.

Three.

Prentiss slid into place, pressing her back against the stone wall. A dim glow was coming from around the corner, flickering and warm. It made it possible to see, down here, painted Prentiss’ curves and angles in half-light.

Two.

There was smoke in the air, thick and honey-scented, making it hard to see, harder to focus.

One.

The chanting increased in intensity and volume, the lone singer coming close to shouting words and syllables that made no sense. He – it was a male voice – was reaching some kind of crescendo, the words coming faster and faster, and still Morgan couldn’t parse them into anything useful.

Go.

They burst around the corner, weapons drawn and forward, SWAT behind them. Morgan took it all in in the first glance:

The tall candlesticks standing in a circle around the middle of the room, and lit votives on the back table.

The symbols on the concrete floor, painted in something dark red.  _Blood._ An optical illusion of some kind made the runes look like they were glowing.

The cloying smoke coming from the incense burner off to the side. Two bodies, their missing cultists, hanging from hooks and obviously past the point of needing help.

Kaplan, tied to a chair, his hands covered in blood and his shirtfront soaked red. Kessler standing over him with a curved knife, dressed like some kind of monk.

“ _Freeze!_ ” Prentiss commanded, and, “drop the knife, put your hands up!”

Kessler broke off his chanting but didn’t drop the knife. He stared at them for a beat, at the drawn guns and Prentiss’ best ‘gonna fuck you up’ face, at Kaplan limp in the chair _,_ at the SWAT team’s assault weapons.

Morgan braced, expecting him to run. There were shadows beyond the candlelight, a vague suggestion of a back door. That would be where he’d bolt-

But he didn’t. He only raised his hands, palms up, the wickedly curved blade of the fancy knife reflecting the candlelight. His smile was toothy and too wide.

Prentiss was in Morgan’s peripheral vision, her fingers pressed to Kaplan’s throat, checking his pulse. She nodded once, then brought her gun back up to train it on Kessler once more.

The breeze from the open door upstairs made the candles flicker and gutter, then flare back to life. Kaplan gurgled and choked in the chair behind them.

Morgan expected defeat in Kessler’s eyes, or defiance, not the triumph he saw staring back at him.

“The gateway is opened,” Kessler gloated. “I have brought the gods back. It is done.”

“If it’s done, then there’s no need for the knife,” Morgan replied, his eye on the blade. Kessler was still too close to Kaplan, could do some serious damage with that thing if he started swinging. “Put it down, and you can tell us all about it.”

“You can put me down, hide the proof, but he and I both know the truth.” He didn’t move as Prentiss slid forward and took the knife from his hand. He let it go, unresisting. “My witness, bound in blood; all the things he denied have been opened to him, and I,  _I –_ am the chosen one.”

Morgan snapped the handcuffs around his wrists. There was a flicker of something in Kessler’s eyes when the iron closed around him, some hint of doubt, maybe, or concern, but by the time Morgan pushed him toward the waiting officers, it was gone again.

The disquiet lingered as he headed back, past Kessler being read his rights, past Prentiss updating Hotch and Rossi, back to the paramedics loading a still-breathing Kaplan onto a stretcher, his throat thankfully intact. Kaplan was muttering and thrashing as they moved him, most of it incoherent, but a few words slipped through. Whatever ‘eyes in the dark’ meant, he had to be having one hell of a fever dream.

Morgan wasn’t a superstitious man, barely believed in God on the best of days. And if Rossi had said something about the way he carefully walked around the circle of intricate runes, rather than step across it, he would have denied it to his deathbed.

And yet.

No-one would ever have called New York City air ‘fresh,’ but when he got outside and breathed deep, got that smell of iron and wax and smoke out of his nose, it was the best and cleanest thing he’d smelled in a good long time.

\--

_What has been set in motion cannot be stopped, not by stone walls or iron bars or miles of electric fence._

_A door has been opened, the lines converge._

_We will bide our time._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still an epilogue to come - don't give up yet!


	6. Friday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein apologies are made, and loose ends tied up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you so much to my betas, khirsah and feebleapb, for help above and beyond the call of duty, and to everyone reading and leaving comments! I love hearing your thoughts on these more than words can express!

**New York Downtown Hospital, NYC**

 

Everything hurt. Hurting was... actually good. Hurting meant things were still attached to other things that could feel pain. So that meant he was alive. Billy lay where he was for a moment, and catalogued everything he could. He was lying in a bed, the sheets were crisp, not soft. The itchy tightness of tape outlined some of the worst hurts. Faint beeping sounds were almost covered by the sounds of voices, and as he drifted in closer out of the depths of sleep and dreams, he could make them out.

Teddy. That was good. He couldn’t remember exactly why, but that was very, _very_ good. He was talking to Tommy, their voices rising and falling in a soothing and familiar rhythm. His mouth was dry and his brain fogged with sleep-haze and something else. He heard his name, and strained to pay attention.

“We’ve been talking about kids; did he tell you? We’re supposed to have a clinic visit next week to talk about surrogates and options.” He knew that sound in Teddy's voice, exhaustion mixed with fear and pain. He'd done that to Teddy; the thought twisted in his gut. But Teddy was alive; whoever got Billy out must have found him as well, and that … was good. There were other words that were better, but he couldn’t find them right now.

“Want my advice?”

“I’m going to get it anyway, aren’t I?”

“Use _your_ junk. The last thing you need is a couple more of us running around causing you grief.” Tommy sounded tired too, which was weird; he didn't like people seeing that. Maybe Teddy didn't count as 'people' anymore.

"I dunno." Teddy's voice had a smile in it, and when Billy cracked his eyes open to check, he had a faint smile on his face, too. That was a nice face. He had a good face. "I could do without _this_ kind of grief, but the Maximoff-slash-Unknown gene pool's not so bad. Dumb as rocks, sometimes, but-"

"You're as nuts as he is."

It was hard to speak, and his eyes felt gummed together with something, but Billy forced them open further, squinting against the light. “Hey,” he complained, and then Teddy was right there, standing over him.

“You’re awake,” he breathed out, and Teddy was beautiful. His eyes were beautiful, and his lips, and his jaw and hair, and he was here and he loved him, and the world was-

“You big dumb _jerk_ ,” Teddy said, looming over him and bracing his hands on either side of Billy’s head. “What the hell were you thinking? No, scratch that," his voice got louder and there was a clench in that perfect jaw as he gritted his teeth. "Because I know you weren't thinking at all. That was one of the – no, _the_ – most idiotic stunt you could ever pull.”

Those beautiful eyes of his were dark with anger; he could see them clearly, this close up, even without his glasses, and he kind of wished that he couldn’t. Teddy was fine, which meant – what? John had lied. Somehow, John had lied, and he’d killed Alex, and Billy had almost died. “What were you _doing_ there _?_ ”

“It was my fault,” Billy tried to wet his lips with his tongue, but everything was dry. Teddy’s weight shifted and Billy reached for it, but his fingers were clumsy, white bandages wrapped around his wrists.

Teddy held the glass and the straw for him, let the water slide, cold and wet, down Billy’s throat.

“John called me,” he tried again, pushing himself up gingerly. His wrists stung and burned and he hissed at the quick rush of pain, still easier to deal with than the ache of guilt in his core. “He said he had you, Teddy. He sent me pictures. Your shirt. He said that if I didn’t go, _alone,_ he’d kill you." He had to make Teddy understand, to take that dark anger out of his eyes. "I made you a target, but he wanted me. I thought-” When he said it out loud, in the light of day, it made a lot less sense than it had felt at the time.

“My green shirt. They found it at the scene. I spilled coffee on it yesterday, went home to change; I left it on the bed.” Teddy trailed off then refocused on Billy. “You thought that you’d – what? Be noble and self-sacrificing and trade your life for mine?” He sounded incredulous, shook his head dumbly.  

Teddy turned away, and the loss of him, even when he was angry; that was enough to run Billy right through. Tommy was still there, leaning against the door and staring out the window, adamantly not watching the exchange.

Teddy sat on the edge of the hospital bed, his eyes running up the IV line to the clear bag hanging over Billy’s head. He didn’t say anything, or do anything, he just… sat. And how could Billy fix that? Yelling was one thing; yelling he could counter, he could argue, he could fight. Teddy’s silent thinking, the unhappiness that was screaming in the curve of his shoulders, the lines on his face; that was all so much worse.

Billy reached out, hesitated, his hand hanging, undecided, in the air. Teddy’s hand rested on the blanket, unmoving. Billy covered it with his own, and what if Teddy pulled away; what if-

Teddy’s fingers curled, opening up space to let Billy’s slide between and lace there.

“You scared the shit out of me,” he confessed after a minute.

“I know.” Billy could feel the urge to babble rising up inside, the words threatening to spill out in incoherent waves. He bit the inside of his cheek to stop the rush. It mostly worked. “I thought you were- that it was the only way I could help. And I am so, so sorry.”

“Yeah,” Teddy agreed, turning back. His face was still grimly set, but when he cupped Billy’s face in his hands, they were soft and warm and gentle. “You are. I’m still mad at you,” he warned, before leaning in to brush his mouth against Billy’s.

His lips were a little chapped, the kiss chaste, but god, it was warm and sweet, weirdly tentative, Teddy’s fingers gripping him tightly, like he was holding Billy in place. Billy pressed forward, pushed in to deepen the touch, but Teddy held him still, kept the breath of distance between them, kissed the line of his cheekbone, the curve of his jaw with delicate reverence. He stopped at Billy’s ear, his voice a soft murmur. “What makes you think I’d _want_ to live in a world without you, you ridiculous asshole?”

“Get a room,” complained Tommy from the door. Behind Teddy’s head, the rest of him fully focused on Teddy’s mouth, Billy flipped him the bird.

 

**BAU Jet, en route to Quantico, VA**

 

The thrum of the jet’s engines were a welcome background noise this time; they always were, coming back from a case. Morgan settled into his seat and pulled out his headphones, the familiar heft of them another part of the ritual. This one was a short flight; he wouldn’t have a chance to make it through the entire playlist, but he could hit the gym later and burn through the rest.

In the meantime, though– Garcia settled in across from him, her knitting appearing in her lap, and Rossi joined her. “We just got the hospital report on Kaplan, if you’re interested,” Rossi opened, and Morgan nodded.  

“He didn’t look so good last night. Did they figure out what Kessler did to him?”

Rossi flipped his tablet over and glanced at the email again. “Wrists got chewed all to hell; they said it looked like he’d been scraped raw by the ropes. The more interesting thing is the wine. No mistletoe in it, but it _was_ spiked. With a derivation of belladonna, this time.”

“That’s a psychotropic drug, isn’t it?” Garcia looked at him with a cocked head, and Morgan explained before she could ask. “Causes hallucinations.”

“Oh lovely,” she replied, her tone dry. “So he was allowed to skip the mistletoe smoothie, but got a free trip to Disneyworld instead.”

“More like Amityville, if you ask me,” Reid interjected from across the aisle, his legs folded in under the narrow table. “Belladonna causes lucid nightmares, and can be fatal in large enough doses.”

“Do you think he was trying to kill him?” Prentiss leaned against the back of Reid’s chair, idly playing with the stir stick in her coffee mug. “There are easier ways to go about it than that.”

Rossi frowned and shook his head. “I doubt it. Kessler wanted a ‘witness’ to his big production; that part seemed to be vitally important. He went to the trouble of luring Kaplan down there specifically.”

“Witnesses don’t need to be around for long,” Prentiss said, with a grim twist to her smile. 

“What I don’t get, is, if he thought of himself as some kind of Grand High Poobah of the Druids,” Garcia asked, frowning behind the pink rims of her glasses, “why was he using a downtown church? You’d think there would be lots of other places where he’d have less chance of being caught.”

“St. Columba’s was decommissioned,” Reid replied, “so it didn’t have any religious power any more, even for those who believe in those things. Any attachment he had to the site was purely symbolic.”

“What do you know about St. Columba?” Rossi asked the room, but his gaze fell on Morgan. JJ and Hotch had reappeared from the rear compartment, and Morgan found all eyes suddenly on him.

He shrugged. “Irish saint? That’s all I got.”

Prentiss snorted. “Some altar boy you were.”

“Alright,” Morgan replied, folding his hands behind his head with a grin. “You tell me, then, smarty-pants.”

But it was Rossi who replied, slipping into Lecture Mode as easily as Reid. “Columba was a sixth-century monastic, dedicated to the conversion of the British isles. The thing he was most known for was the conversion of pagan Scotland to Christianity. And that often wasn’t a peaceful thing.”

Garcia glanced between them, her knitting forgotten in her lap. “So picking his church was what, a form of payback?”

Reid considered it, tipping his head back and forth as he thought. “Blood sacrifice was considered powerful magic back then; ‘blood calls to blood.’ It’s conceivable that he chose Columba both because of the connection to Dr. Kaplan, and as a way to try and reclaim that site in the names of Columba’s original victims.”

All this talk about magic and history was way out of Morgan’s purview, and he dropped his arms, played with his music player until his playlist loaded up. “History or not,” he declared after a moment, “It doesn’t change the fact that the guy was seriously delusional.”

“And, thankfully,” Garcia replied, picking up her project as the others found their seats, “no longer our problem.”

Reid drew out his deck of cards, Hotch settled in with his book, and Morgan relaxed back into his chair. She was right. This case was over and done, and one small section of the world had been put back in order. Time to let it go, and move on.

__

 

“We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all of the power we need inside ourselves already.”

-         J.K. Rowling

 

 


End file.
